"I want it to be revealing. I'll talk about anything you like. I want it to be truthful. Let's do it. There is no off-limits. I'm afraid of nothing." Immediately recognised as a young artist with a brilliant, sordid and uncompromising imagination, Damien Hirst is the most celebrated artist Britain has produced for generations. The undisputed leader and originator of the dominant movement in contemporary art on both sides of the Atlantic, he is now so ingrained in the public consciousness that even those with only a passing interest in art are familiar with his notorious shark and pickled sheep. Gordon Burn met Hirst for the first time nine years ago. Both admirers of David Sylvester's interviews with Francis Bacon and Jan Wenner's interviews with John Lennon, there was always an unspoken understanding between them that they would do something similar when the time was right. The resulting conversations in On the Way to Work are electrifyingly candid. True to the undertaking Hirst gave Burn, there is no off-limits: here are Hirst's thoughts on celebrity, money, art, alcohol, sex, death, the North of England, class, crime and cocaine; his views on Marco Pierre White, Charles Saatchi, David Bowie, Gilbert and George and Lucian Freud. Damien Hirst's art and life came to define the nineties. Like the generation Hirst has come to represent, On the Way to Work is brave, unpredictable, scabrously funny and corrosively intelligent. It is also a how-to guide to becoming the most famous artist in the world.

Damien Hirst: On the Way to Work

Arts & Photography

History & Criticism

Other Criteria Books

Published in 2006 following Damien Hirst's first major print exhibition at the Paul Stolper Gallery in London in 2005, New Religion explores Hirst's central themes: ''I was thinking that there are four important things in life: religion, love, art and science... Of them all, science seems to be the right one now. Like religion, it provides the glimmer of hope that maybe it will be all right in the end.'' With full-color reproductions of this entire series of Hirst silkscreen prints produced for the New Religion exhibition, such as "The Apostles," "The Wound of Christ," "The Last Supper" and "The Stations of the Cross," as well as editioned sculptures and multiples such as "The Fate of Man" and the 'box/cabinet' called "New Religion," this hardback publication is a modern day biblical picture-book exploring combinations between science and religion. And the ideas about Hirst's science/religion dichotomy are further explored through an intriguing interview with Sean O'Hagan that moves effortlessly from the macro to the micro, and back again, ''I just can't help thinking that science is the new religion for many people. It's as simple and as complicated as that really.''

Damien Hirst: New Religion

<div>End of Real, by artist Itai Doron, is a photographic diary of the places he visited whilst preparing exhibitions in different parts of the world during the 1990s. The photographs - or "postcards&rdquo; as Doron describes them - were taken using a 15-dollar camera he picked up from Woolworths in Los Angeles, and they document the artist&rsquo;s fascination with the dream-like world of fame, legends and celebrity. Through seven stories from three countries, each made personal by Doron&rsquo;s introductions, we are invited to visit places where fiction meets reality: the Hollywood sign in Los Angeles, the fatal route James Dean took to Salinas, an Elvis impersonators contest in Tel Aviv, the famous Shepperton film studios in London, and the graves of countless film stars and modernday heroines from Marilyn Monroe and Marlene Dietrich to Princess Diana. Designed by Intro and with a forward by Nicolas Roeg, cinematographer and director of cult masterpieces such as Don&rsquo;t Look Now and Performance, End of Real is Doron&rsquo;s first project in book form. After a childhood filled with visits to the movies and with stories told to him by his mother about its stars, Itai Doron&rsquo;s work is strongly influenced by cinema. Having worked as a visual artist using media as varied as photographs, photo-collages, video and audio-visual installations, in 2004 he wrote and directed his first short feature film, The Trouble with Thomas Cruise, starring horror movie legend Linda Hayden.</div>

Itai Doron: End of Real

Itai Doron

Individual Artists

This is the first significant publication on the work of British painter Neal Tait. This visually fascinating book takes 'a studio approach' to illustrate the range and focus of Tait's paintings. Photographs of Tait's archive collection of found imagery (including newspaper cuttings), sketchbook drawings, preparatory drawings and finished drawings are woven within the body of full colour reproductions of his paintings, allowing for lateral readings of the genesis and development of ideas alongside finished works. Initially, Tait's output reflects a rather idiosyncratic narrative, harnessed to what might be broadly described as a 'contemporary European sensibility', but this publication reveals that Tait is in fact wrestling with a strong sense of painting's tradition, something in-keeping with a painter's painter.This book includes the paintings which perhaps brought Tait's work to wider appeal – the ghost-like heads, appearing as if x-rayed by generally tonal colours, emphasizing the relationship between the weight of the surface of a painting in relation to the presence of a sitter. And this cornerstone of negative presence is something that can be seen to recur or resurrect itself throughout the more recent open-ended picture making. Fragments of the body are often merged with their surroundings, abstracting them from their 'home' context in order that they might act as a signifier in the space of the 'painting' and, by so doing creating a tension between what we know the thing to be and what Tait's emotional and psychological connection could be. Birds, a birdhouse, a television or a playground swing take on a more significant charge in a world that seems, oddly, in tension between a calm innocence and an anxious foreboding. And this is further emphasized by Tait's exquisite colour sense and draughtsmanship - a child-like palette of warm and cold tones and bright energetic high-key colour (reminiscent of the Paris School), contained within a firm but delicate stylized line. Along with two intelligent and empathetic essays by Michael Bracewell and Jeremy Millar, this publication is more a catalogue of a practice -a practice which is about itself and the subject the medium eventually finds and commits to saying.

Neal Tait

Jeremy Millar & Michael Bracewell

Joo is a substantial monograph on the work of American/Korean artist Michael Joo surveying all his finished projects, as well as some preliminary work, since his graduation in 1991. Joo describes his art as "a complex network of non-hierarchic information" with several layers of meaning that trigger multiple associations, and the book includes his extended captions alongside each project. Michael Joo works in a wide range of media, including sculpture, installation, animation and performance-based video art. His work frequently investigates themes centring around questions of identity, juxtaposing Eastern spiritualism with the Western way of understanding the world. Fascinated by the interaction between nature and its surroundings, Joo also has a profound interest in scientific processes. Thematically, his projects explore dualities such as linear and cyclical, physical and metaphysical, real and unreal, natural and unnatural, often using a visual language which combines highly complex geometric and structural patterns with 'real' objects – bodily fluids, eggs and mosquitoes – from nature.

Michael Joo

<div>Film, Music and Novel is an 'ideal&rsquo; solo exhibition presented in book form: a core collection of art works by German artist Thomas Scheibitz, self selected and sequenced. As the title anticipates, the book is divided into three sections. In the 'Film&rsquo; section Scheibitz exhibits oil paintings including the six pieces he recently created for the 2005 Venice Biennale; 'Music&rsquo; showcases his drawings, sculptures and work-in-progress models; the final 'Novel&rsquo; section brings together the artist&rsquo;s most significant works on paper. The book commences with a unique essay-collage mixing together a variety of sources such as articles, polaroids, sketches and personal notes, through which Scheibitz gives clues that, while also further expanding it, provide a deeper understanding of his oeuvre. Designed by Jason Beard, Film, Music and Novel presents a unique and thorough overview of the artists work to date as retold by him. Always taking as his starting point familiar images from contemporary culture, stylistically Thomas Scheibitz works in the abstract tradition, using vibrant colours, geometric forms, fragmented type and deconstructed shapes. Fascinated by constructions and compositions, and the various ways people experience them, Scheibitz is on a constant quest to define the limitations and legitimacy of the very medium he is working with, be it painting, sculpture or drawing.</div>

Thomas Scheibitz: Film, Music and Novel Spielfilm, Musik und Roman

In Advance of the Institution can be described as a textbook for John Isaacs' world view, a view which emphasises that: "The common thread in all of the varying definitions of language is the concept of rifts between individual people, animals, even inanimate objects and how these gaps may best be bridged." Compositing numerous sourced texts, by writers such as H.G. Wells, Freud, Jung, Einstein, Adam Smith, and The Bible, alongside reproductions of Isaacs' work, In Advance of the Institution constructs an intriguing and engaging lateral narrative that underlies the difference and similarities between ideas, objects, and the actions of individuals, in relation to social constructs. Although John Isaacs is generally regarded as a sculptor, his praxis incorporates a range of different mediums – from found object constructions, to video and photographs. This range emphasises his world view that buried under the surface of our apparent isolation from one another lies a universal connection – from the physical functioning of the bodies we inhabit to the dreams, successes and failures of the individual and society. In that sense, In Advance of the Institution entirely encapsulates and reflects Isaacs' practice, and with 188 pages of text and full colour reproductions, this publication stands out as an exceptionally interesting piece of art in its own right.

John Isaacs: In Advance of the Institution

This new Other Criteria publication focuses entirely on drawings made by the London-based painter Philip Allen. With accurate reproductions colour marker and pen drawings on cream paper simply presented without any accompanying text, this book provides an excellent visual insight into Allen's unique method of pictorial construction and inventiveness as a draughtsman. Looking at Allen's drawings in this book is similar to seeing them in his studio, arranged one after another across a wall, some with similar characteristics to that of school exercise book doodles and cartoons, others making, referencing and developing the imagery found in his paintings. The 'whirls and twirls' at the bottom and top of the drawings may be an instinctive or idiosyncratic part of Allen's mark- making, but they also refer to the clumps and gatherings of paint that sit heavily at the top and bottom of his paintings, working both to contain the motif in the 'middle' of the picture and to raise aesthetic dialogue. Allen's drawings are therefore notes on his paintings as well as things that explore the diversity and range of the 'office stationery' he uses, which gives them a vibrant appeal and a very contemporary quality. This exquisite book shows that Allen's drawings are very accomplished, with a simplicity that hides a complexity unique to the practice of drawing and, as such, makes this publication a welcome and innovative contribution to the canon of books on painters.

Phillip Allen: Drawings

This book is a creative guide to the making of arguably the most extraordinary art object to be made in the 21st century. Published to accompany the 2007 exhibition "Damien Hirst: Beyond Belief" at White Cube, it gives a fascinating pictorial insight into how Hirst's diamond skull piece "For the Love of God" was conceived and produced. Illustrated with candid behind-the-scenes photographs by Johnnie Shand Kydd, the book includes a number of preparatory drawings by Damien Hirst and a fold-out image of the diamond skull. Accompanying this is an essay by the art historian Rudi Fuchs, who writes, "The skull is out of this world, celestial almost. I tend to see it as a glorious intense victory over death." A number of leading experts in the fields of archeology and dentistry have also contributed detailed studies on the diamond skull, including analyses of its age and ancestry.

Damien Hirst: For the Love of God, The Making of The Diamond Skull

HIRST, Damien

Published to accompany Damien Hirst's 2007 exhibition at White Cube in London, Beyond Belief shows new work by Hirst including major formaldehyde pieces, to the more recent "fact paintings" and the now legendary diamond skull "For the Love of God," emphasising that Hirst is quite possibly the most outstanding international contemporary artist: "This is the real beginning of the 21st century, just as the 20th began with the Demoiselles d'Avignon. I don't care about the so-called meaning, this thing is about victory over death. This is an image so tremendously powerful that it will change art." Beyond Belief includes over 70 exquisite full colour plates and an essay by novelist and writer Will Self that discusses hallmark works such as "A Thousand Years" (1990), and Hirst's practice and ascendance to international fame through the late 1990s. Accompanying Self 's insightful and engaging text is an in-depth interview between Hirst and Hans Ulrich Obrist, Co-Director of London's Serpentine Gallery, and also an essay by art historian andcurator Rudi Fuchs that considers and explores the significance of 'For the Love of God' in relation to Hirst's oeuvre: "After all, Damien Hirst's art is concerned with love and fear, with death, malady, physical decay, medical practice and pharmaceutical illusion ... The inevitable proximity of death is the most real thing in human life. Fear of death is a more powerful emotion than love or lust. To some extent fear of death keeps us alive."

Damien Hirst: Beyond Belief

See the best price to sell, buy or rent books by the Other Criteria Books publisher. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Other Criteria Books