This Pass or Prepared is based on a New York Times review of Damien Hirst's New York Exhibition by Roberta Smith. It should give you an idea how artists attempt to answer the same basic questions, like "How shall I live?" as sociologists, philosophers, and all the rest of us do.

Click on the question numbers for jeanne's (hopefully) plausible answers:

Roberta Smith speaks of how, Mr. Hirst, in his best work brings the "visual and mental into perfect balance." How does she explain the effect? For example, when she says "One shiny vitrine presents the artificial skeletons of two dozen small mammals, all perfect and white with their miraculous engineering everywhere apparent; it is as wonderful to look at them as structures as it is to identify the animals (several dogs and cats) and to find one's reverence encapsulated in the work's title, "Something Solid Beneath the Surface of Several Things Wise and Wonderful." Does that really give you a picture of what Hirst's art work looks like? Or does it suggest that there are some effects that can't be articulated, that need the visual?

2. How does this bringing of the visual and the mental into perfect balance fit into postmodernism?

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4. "Mr. Hirst's main objective seems to be to get us to look at the wonders and horrors of natural life and to realize not only that they are often the same thing, but also that both have been intensified by man's pursuit of knowledge." Does this sound at all like Fellman? How?

Think of Fellman's suggestion that we deny the "bad" things, and that leads to denial, which leaves us with fear and anger.

4. They speak in an article on the auction of New York Cities Cows of Hirst's work. He painted a cow sliced, apparently in all its horror. David Lynch did a similar thing for the New York Cow show. Why might both artists have chosen to portray the horror of butchering the pretty cows for tourists?

Consider what Smith believes Hirst's main objective to be.

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