Beautiful Where Did All the Colour Go Painting

The title "Beautiful Where Did All the Colour Go" may seem mysterious at first sight but becomes apparent through the unusual artistic technique, which Hirst used for this painting. The artist (born in 1965) made use of an old ironic trick which was popular at English fairs in the years around his own birth: There is an automatically rotating canvas onto which children can arbitrarily apply colour. The rotation causes the colour to spread all over the canvas in an uncontrollable and random way. By this Hirst gives up voluntarily any intentional authorship of his painting, but he signs it after the end of the consciously unconscious act of color application and accords it a value referring to his own status on the art market. Typical for the English artist is the thereby connected statement about the power of coincidence in the right context and about the subtle irony of postmodern genius cult which contrasts with the fact that post modernism has committed itself to reproducibility.