This Is Your Brain on Pause

Reuters Damien Hirst's "Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind"

By MICHAEL KIMMELMAN

Published: April 3, 2005

Gagosian Gallery "Autopsy With Brain Out" by Damien Hirst, in a show at the Gagosian Gallery.

WITH his first New York show since 2000, Damien Hirst, abandoning his famous menagerie of dead sharks and pharmaceuticals and eight-foot-wide ashtrays and air-blown beach balls and humongous anatomical models, has unveiled at Larry Gagosian's Chelsea emporium 31 photorealist paintings, all heavily assistant-aided and tongue in cheek. The subjects include skulls, crystals, pills, a doctor proffering a brain, an empty hospital hallway, an emaciating crack addict, a bloody soccer hooligan, dissecting tables - campy shockers, aimed at Page Six and hedge fund speculators.

The show's opening galvanized the predictable mob of ebullient celebrities and tut-tutting rubberneckers. They cheerfully congregated before paintings of car bombings and of a monkey receiving an injection in the face. It isn't clear whether anyone noticed, amid the revelry, that a moment had passed.

That moment encompasses the laddish phase of Mr. Hirst's charmed pop-star trajectory, which first brought him widespread fame more than a decade ago as the clowning, precocious ringmaster of the Young British Artists. The Y.B.A.'s were, and are, a diverse group, their linkage really just a marketing ploy by their prime collector, Charles Saatchi. The term is now outmoded and, like Mr. Hirst, middle-aged. But in its day, Mr. Hirst was the group's natural front man. He had talent, and he had the act down. He was a buoyant and canny entrepreneur and impresario, a savvy scavenger of art history with a nose for fashion and publicity; and he concocted a big, shiny, brightly colored and easily accessible universe of giddy, winning naughtiness. The universe consisted of putrefying animals, gynecological equipment, dot and spin paintings, glass, mirror and stainless steel.

Mr. Hirst's recipe was a love-it-or-hate-it cocktail of death, celebrity, sex and technology, heavily spiked with comic self-promotion. The work was at heart about money, or about the love affair between art and money, Warhol's juicy subject. It openly trumpeted its own costly materialism and cheap thrills, in keeping with a certain upbeat and winking strain of pop culture.

Americans could recognize in Mr. Hirst a cross between Jeff Koons and Julian Schnabel, although he was always a British type - the pied piper of cheekiness. His vulgar, macabre delirium was awful, but almost endearing: Mr. Hirst had just enough panache to charm some fence sitters and keep detractors off balance. He also had a real knack for clinical materials that married Duchamp to Donald Judd. It became his signature mode.

So did his sense of fun. That he was part owner and designer of a short-lived London hot spot was in keeping. Like him, it succeeded spectacularly by failing in the end. The Pharmacy was a restaurant outfitted with pharmaceutical cabinets and a staff decked in Prada lab coats. Briefly, it captured the New Labor/Cool Brittania spirit of the late 90's. When it folded in 2003, after being sold, Mr. Hirst, who had shrewdly only leased its art, then bought its fixtures and fittings, auctioned the lot - which fetched $20 million at Sotheby's, souvenirs of style. Not long before the present show opened in New York, word got out, conveniently for Mr. Hirst and Mr. Gagosian, that a hedge fund billionaire named Stephen Cohen had paid the sensational price of $8 million (or possibly more) for Mr. Hirst's shark in formaldehyde. The seller was Mr. Saatchi, who has lately turned his attention instead to (surprise) paintings. Meanwhile, Mr. Hirst's new show has reportedly sold out. The paintings were said to be priced at up to $2 million apiece.

Promoting the exhibition, Mr. Hirst has burbled on about the joys and mysteries of painting and the deeper meanings of his spooky symbolism in ways surely calculated to sound naïve and cunning at the same time. Irony inoculates him against criticism, starting with the obvious criticism that his latest pictures are terrible. They are, Mr. Hirst can say.Warhol is his role model, but increasingly also his rebuke. Warhol got there first and did it all better, years ago, including the deadpan corporate routine and the death-obsessed imagery, which in Mr. Hirst's new paintings seems second-hand and off the mark. Photorealism in its original incarnation was a hit-and-miss offshoot of Pop and a response to Abstract Expressionism; it shared with Minimalism and Conceptualism a cool, detached faith in order; it gravitated toward banal, not outlandish, subjects so that people would focus more on its mechanical ethos. By comparison, Mr. Hirst's flat-footed pictures, blithely lacking finesse, ignore photorealism's first goals and aspire only to be passingly ghoulish.

And absent invention, they hang there like corpses. They also arrive amid a booming youth market, as shallow and money-obsessed as Mr. Hirst, and just as enamored of fashion, but with a higher premium placed on solo handicraft and earnestness or at least on the appearance of it. Other paintings abound in Chelsea for comparison - not universally good, but generally craftier about the medium, making more of paint's expressive potential and its physical allure. Just up the block from Gagosian, on 24th Street, are shows by Magnus von Plessen, Jules de Balincourt, Martin Kippenberger, Eric Fischl and Gary Hume that at least feature more painterly paintings.

Mr. Hirst proffers instead a grab bag of apparent allusions - to artists like Gerhard Richter and Bridget Riley and Luc Tuymans - as if to compensate for his carefree lack (or his assistants' lack) of formal skills and to flatter insiders. But the painter who leaps first to mind is Damian Loeb, America's Motel 6 version of a bad boy photorealist, who traffics in supposedly shocking subjects. It doesn't get worse than to say that Mr. Hirst looks as if he is following in the footsteps of Mr. Loeb, who had once followed in his, hoping for tabloid notoriety. The era of the giant strutting ego as the amusing subject of art at this moment seems wincingly passé, supplanted by all those insouciant 20-somethings proffering their monkish, shuffling sort of virtuosity.

So investors and glossy magazines keep Mr. Hirst's business and celebrity booming. But being gifted and savvy, he might want to return to the drawing board. His act has jumped the shark.