Damien Hirst's first show in New York since 2000 has opened at Gagosian Chelsea. As predicted, the lines for getting into the opening were huge. He celebrated at Lever House (where a grand sculpture by him has been installed) with people from the art world. He is happy. Larry is happy. We are not happy.
The circa 30 paintings presented all around the cavernous galleries of Gagosian's domains are photo realist translations into canvas of photos depicting those things Damien Hirst likes: pills, medicines, death, brains, drugs. This new work marks a radical getaway (or just a pause?) from his previous stuff, whether the cow sculptures, the cabinets or the dots and butterflies paintings.
All that masterful, powerful art that divided the world between Hirst-lovers and Hirst-haters is gone, and now we face cheap, ugly realism sheared of any meaning or enjoyment that will most likely gather the whole world in the Hirst-haters side.
“The Elusive Truth”, the name of Hirst’s show, is Bad Art recalling the infamous Black Velvet Paintings, those tasteless images of fluorescent Elvis, pin-ups, tigers in the jungle and flashy Virgins that defined Kitsch in the 60's and 70's. A total disgrace.
The titles have lost all grandiosity and/or pretentiousness of Damien Hirst's effords in the past (The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living, his infamous shark; Theories, Models, Methods, Approaches, Assumptions, Results, and Findings, the title of his last show in Gagosian, 2000). His metaphysical baroque prose is gone, welcome "Credit Card Fraud", "The Devastating Impact of Crack Cocaine", "Addicted to Crack, Abandoned by Society", "Football Violence", "Suicide Bomber" and other silly, risible titles.
If this were the work and words of a chicano painter from Tijuana shown in the curb of a border highway, it would be meritorious. But trying to deliver this at Gagosian Chelsea as "Art" it's pulling the leg of any serious viewer.
The “Credit Card Fraud”, a big painting full of credit cards with one hand sliding a card, is so pointless and empty that hurts and bothers. The “Suicide Bomber” is not only awful and disgraceful, but a senseless exploitation of the Baghdad tragedy for what?. “Football Violence” is silly, so very silly and garish. The Minerals and Gemstones leave me perplex. Why!? What in earth for!?
The two paintings of the crack addicts remind me of "the faces of meth", scary photos of physical transformation caused by the methamphetamine in white trailer trash in Oregon published on the internet. Now, if a Pacific Northwest painter starts making paintings of the meth destruction in America, would that be even considered? Exploit! Exploit!
The stupidest and brassiest, lousiest and tawdriest of all these wacky, ignoble creations that will embarrass the City of New York for more than a month are the two twin big paintings of skulls, heavy-metal-style. An 80’s fan of Judas Priest would have died for hanging these pieces in his-her room. They are so bad! So, so bad they’re even cute for making us smile.
Other gaudy examples of Damien Hirst’s free downfall into the realms of non-art include a monkey being tortured in a laboratory and an open bloody brain.
They all inspire disesteem and disrespect, the same he transmits in his paintings (I coincide with young critic David Shapiro in his saying, "Hirst's art is impersonal, lacking empathy, and variously amoral and immoral", even though he applies this to the work presented in Gagosian 2000). Hirst insists in his interest in death and suffering, but the metaphysic preoccupations that his work before this showed are now gone for pure mental emptiness and opaque, dead images. There is literally and artistically nothing in “The Elusive Truth”.
The only savable stuff from all this enormous mess is the pills and medicines paintings, if only for being Hirst signature and remembrance from the good past.
Waldemar Januszczak, an art critic for the British The Sunday Times, was invited by Damien Hirst to preview the “The Elusive Truth” series before it was shipped to America and sucked by collectors with no sense of taste but ample pockets and financial vision. This critic person paid back the favor of being selected to sneak into the studio, and wrote things like “Hogarth, Turner, Bacon would have risked it this way”, saying that it is “exciting stuff” and the paintings “work”. In which sense, may I ask?
Another thorny aspect of Hirst’s latest explosion is the authorship. Januszczak writes that “the team of the assistants do most of the bread-and-butter copying" and Hirst "patrols the results". "A dab here, a daub there". "They are not their paintings" (the assistants'), "they're his". "And to ensure this is clear, he swaps the assistants around from picture to picture so nobody is ever responsible for the whole thing".
The question of who makes what and who gets the name is difficult. Jeff Koons is a famous example of conceptual artist- he has the idea, his large studio makes it happen. Sol LeWitt has probably never executed himself a wall drawing, but that’s part of his game. Richard Serra does not found his million tons mammoth steel sculptures, but the models are his. Felix Gonzalez-Torres used piles of candy bought in some supplier. From 1964, Donald Judd never made his art himself again but had it manufactured by a commercial fabricator. And nobody yet complains about the authorship of the art of these giants of contemporary creation.
But ah, the painting. The noble art of painting. It’s not the same to make sculpture or conceptual art and painting. And definitely not the same if we talk photo realism, in which we assume and ask for a highly personal skill and capacity to recreate the aspect of real life. What if Richard Estes, Chuck Close or Ralph Goings would not have an actual brush in their famously photorealist canvas? Collectors and dealers and museums and viewers wouldn’t be happy.
But these are painters that may spend years in a single painting, while Damien Hirst’s assistants made 30 paintings in three years. And this is hardly new, though. Most of his art of the 90’s, the sharks and the pharmacies and the dot paintings, was handled by assistants. The Sunday Times said in December 1999, “If Hirst is notable for anything, it is for finally severing the link between the "artist" and the person who actually saws up the wildlife, colours in the dots, polishes the surgical instruments and so on (his assistants take care of all that). It is safe to say that he rarely gets his hands dirty”, in a statement very similar to those of Dan Flavin and Donald Judd, and conceptual art in general.
The paintings are the problem, and it will be. Nowadays, Jeff Koons and Damien Hirst have the idea and sign the canvas, but others do the actual work. When that happened with the Old Masters (Rubens, Raphael, Perugino, Velazquez), it made curators, conservators and collectors in the 20th century to carefully find out who made which part of the painting, how much of the work is the creation of the master and how much is workshop aide. A painting in which only the heads are original Rubens will be obviously dropped off consideration and price compared to one totally executed by the master himself.
The key seems to be why the authorship matters in Rubens but not in Hirst (or if it will matter for Hirst in the future to come), and why painting raises questions of originality conceptual art doesn't.
Also, Rubens needed a workshop and assistants because he had plenty of commissions and requests, and couldn’t deliver himself alone. In the case of Hirst, he has the idea of making a photo realist painting, but he does not know how. He lacks the ability, and that’s dangerous waters to navigate through.
But forget the authorship. The business! Oh Ah! The business! The “Elusive Truth” series on view at Gagosian Chelsea are priced between the 200,000 dollars (the smallest ones) up to 2,000,000 million dollars (the biggest canvases). The show opened on Friday night. On Thursday evening, everything was sold. Apartments in Park Avenue, mansions in Greenwich, Conn., summer palaces in The Hamptons. All will be soon filled with Crack Cocaine Addicts, Tortured Monkeys, Big Skulls, Credit Cards, Minerals and Suicide Bombers. That world from which the buyers of a Hirst painting are so outrageously disconnected will show up over their Ralph Lauren sofas. Or hide on storage awaiting profitable resale. If that’s the point of the Hirst show, it is well done. If it’s not it, there’s no point to these paintings.
Larry Gagosian will profit not only for the millions of Damien Hirst’s pieces, but also from turning his super swanky gallery in a cheap Wal-Mart offering a Hirst-signed poster for $250, unsigned for a mere 20 bucks. All sorts of catalogues and books ridiculously overpriced (the catalogue for the Hirst retrospective in Naples, Italy, sells for $90, with an original price of 32 euros/42 dollars). And the grandest retail offering- t-shirts with the skulls! Buy one if you cannot afford the painting! Show the world your love for ye olde heavy-metal fashion!
(Richard Serra has signed posters at Gagosian Chelsea for sale, $20 dollars; wonder what he thinks about his boss Larry and the $250-Hirst-posters business)
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I recently read a destructive critic of the Damien Hirst retrospective in the Museo Nazionale Archeologico of Naples, Italy, penned by destructor critic Jonathan Jones in The Guardian of London. And I thought, “he’s whacking Hirst for being Hirst, for doing sharks and dot paintings”, on the same style he used for criticizing Julian Schnabel for being “baroque and grandiloquent”. You can’t attack the essence of an artist if you want to have a reasonable critic. Would you laugh at Michelangelo for painting ceilings? Write against El Greco for paintings expressionistic figures? Wordly destroying Damien Hirst seems to be a favorite hobby of the British press.
Now I find myself whacking Damien Hirst, for my own mourn and pity. I vividly remember the deep impression a canvas full of black butterflies that made it look like an Ad Reinhardt caused on me during a visit to the recent Guggenheim New York’s exhibition of minimal art. That was the work of a genius mind that I revere(d). Now, I face paintings that I see hanging in a meth lab inside a trailer parked in the wastelands of Indiana. Their proud owners shake their mullets and show their skulls t-shirts while talking about the 20 bucks they paid for the whole series in a trailer camp sale.
"When you brain's rotted away, you won't have any ideas" (Damien Hirst)
