This post was originally published on artnews.com
Maurizio Cattelan’s banana duct-taped to a wall, titled Comedian (2019), can’t stay out of the news. This time, Damien Hirst has chosen the artwork to be included in Art In Schools, a digital project to bring museum-quality art into British classrooms.
“Art In Schools intends to transform art education by leaping over the traditional hurdles of poor funding and the inaccessibility of museums. How? It’s simple. We bring the museum to the kids,” the registered charity’s website says.
Hirst joins other prominent contemporary artists in selecting works for the project, which hopes to reach one million students each day in 1,000 schools by 2027. They include sculptor Antony Gormley, Op Art pioneer Bridget Riley, and Cornelia Parker, who was shortlisted for the Turner Prize in 1997. Their chosen artworks are by artists ranging from Georgia O’Keefe to Vincent van Gogh.
Art In Schools will install large “ArtScreen” TVs in schools, which will display the selected paintings, sculptures, photos, and digital artworks from national and international museum collections. In a statement, the charity project said it “aims to bridge the ‘art gap’ by increasing access to a wide range of artworks for all children and young adults across the UK.”
Alongside Comedian, Hirst has also chosen William Blakes’ The Ghost of a Flea (1819–20). The miniature painting is part of the Tate’s collection.
At the launch of the project last weekend, Hirst said Comedian, “is everything art gets a bad name for and everything I love about art. It’s perfect and it’s a real banana. So it’s real and not a representation of anything, which means you can trust it, but you can’t. And you have to replace the banana over time, which is obvious and silly. It makes me laugh out loud and it’s serious art.”
The duct-taped banana sold for $6.2 million last November at Sotheby’s in New York. The real banana, which is replaced with a new one every few days when it is displayed, will not be on show in UK schools, though. Rather, it will be beamed in high resolution to students through the loaned “ArtScreens.”
Art In Schools is rolling out its nationwide project after a successful trial run in three schools in 2023. “Our goal is to ensure every student, regardless of location or background, has access to the transformative power of art,” the charity’s founder and CEO, Winton Rossiter, said in a statement. “We are now able to offer a unique, technology-driven solution of national scale.”
Bridget Riley chose Van Gogh’s Long Grass with Butterflies for the project. She said she selected it because “you don’t see the butterflies at once, but as you look for them, you also see so many different kinds of plants and leaves. It is so surprising what a patch of long grass can reveal.”
Sculptor Antony Gormley, famous for his huge Angel of the North installation, selected a trio of other human-made landmarks. One of them is the Stones of Stenness in the Orkneys, which date from 3100 to 2900 BC. He said “they root us in present-time experience, while connecting us to sky and earth, time and space.”
Cornelia Parker went for Paolo Uccello’s set of three paintings, The Battle of San Romano. She said they probably inspired her own best known work, Cold Dark Matter: An Exploded View.
Sir Charles Saumarez Smith, the former chief executive of the Royal Academy, and former director of London’s National Gallery and National Portrait Gallery said in a statement, “Art In Schools will allow museums to share the nation’s art with so many more young people than ever before. It’s an ambitious programme deserving of broad support from the cultural establishment.”