So much for BritArt: Saatchi turns to Germans

By Louise Jury, Arts Correspondent
Monday, 4 July 2005

Charles Saatchi has shunned British artists in favour of Germans in a new exhibition of paintings that opens tomorrow at his London gallery.

The show is the second of a trio of exhibitions under the title The Triumph of Painting, which began in the former County Hall building earlier this year.

The advertising millionaire surprised the art world when he set aside the installations and sculptures for which he is best known in favour of works on canvas. "For me, and for people with good eyes who actually enjoy looking at art, nothing is as uplifting as standing before a great painting, whether it was painted in 1505 or last Tuesday," he told The Art Newspaper.

Although not necessarily known to a broad British public, many of the selected artists in part two are, like those in part one, firmly established in their own countries. Thomas Scheibitz, 37, for example, is representing Germany at the Venice Biennale, the long-standing international showcase of contemporary art.

The other artists are Albert Oehlen, 51, Franz Ackermann, 42, Dirk Skreber, 44, and Kai Althoff, 39, plus the Pole Wilhelm Sasnal, 33. Their subjects include the fall of Communism in Eastern Europe, natural disasters and accidents.

The exhibition is the first curated by Mr Saatchi since the 1987 New York Now show to exclude British artists - though part one included the Brit Peter Doig and the final instalment, due in November, will exhibit work by Dexter Dalwood.

Mr Saatchi lost nearly 150 works, including Tracey Emin's tent embroidered with the names of everyone she had slept with, in the Momart warehouse fire in May last year.

But this has not deterred the determined art-lover from acquiring new works. He is an assiduous visitor to a vast network of small and up-and-coming galleries, as well as more established art venues.

Has Saatchi, patron of sharks and unmade beds, gone off Brit Art?

From The Times

July 4, 2005

By Sophie Kirkham CHARLES SAATCHI, the champion of modern British artists, has excluded homegrown talent from his new exhibition, which opens today.

The multimillionaire art collector will be displaying works by German and Polish painters in the show — the first time one of his exhibitions has not featured a British artist since 1987.

Mr Saatchi has been a collector and exhibitor of British artists for the past 15 years and is widely regarded as an influential force in the Brit Art movement of the 1990s through his acquisition of controversial works such as Tracey Emin’s unmade bed and Damien Hirst’s sharks in formaldehyde.

But not since his New York Now show at his old North London gallery 18 years ago has he opened the doors to a show that excludes British talent.

In a change of direction early last year he began selling off his more sensational pieces or relegating them to the storage rooms. Then came the fire at the Momart warehouse in the East End of London in May last year, which destroyed 144 works in the collection.

Although devastated by the fire, Mr Saatchi continued to offload many of his old favourites, including £16 million of Hirst, and started buying up about 150 paintings from mainly Europe and America. He also sold Marc Quinn’s Self, a cast of the artist’s head in nine pints of his frozen blood.

Mr Saatchi, 62, has now given his entire gallery over to painting and has reportedly told The Art Newspaper that the Young British Artists, who proved such crowd pleasers a decade ago, may be “nothing but footnotes” in art history. “Nothing is as uplifting as standing before a great painting,” he declared.

The Triumph of Painting series is a showcase of different styles including abstract, figurative, landscape and Pop Art.

The Triumph of Painting: Part 2, which opens at the Saatchi Gallery, in London’s County Hall, concentrates on works by one Polish and five German artists and features natural disasters and the fall of communism in Eastern Europe as some of its themes.

The series began in January this year and will run until May 2007. The first collection to be shown featured one British painter, Peter Doig, and the next will feature the Londoner Dexter Dalwood. In the final part of The Triumph of Painting just three of the nineteen artists are British-born.

A spokeswoman for the Saatchi Gallery said: “This is not making a point about the state of British painting. The show just has a very international feel to it. At this stage it is northern European and these artists were particularly strong together.”

Can England's Most Artful Power Plant Turn Up the Juice?

By ALAN RIDING

Published: June 12, 2005

LONDON

THE vast brick-faced power plant standing across the Thames from St. Paul's Cathedral still seems like an implausible home for a major museum, but that no longer worries Londoners. In the five years since Tate Modern opened, it has become a phenomenon: social, economic, urban, even artistic. And here, it seems, success counts more than appearance.

True, the Swiss architects Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron did an imaginative job converting the monolithic building. They left its 350-foot-high chimney, raised the "skirt" of its facade at ground level and added a new glass-fronted top floor. Inside, they created three floors of exhibition space and left its cavernous Turbine Hall as a challenge to artists and curators.

But the real alchemy occurred when the people arrived. From its first days, Tate Modern drew crowds, devoted as much to discovering London's first modern-art museum as to hanging out in its large bookstore, its cafes and its top-floor restaurant overlooking the river. Indeed, helped by free admission (except for temporary shows), it has become a genuine public space.

Little wonder, then, that for its fifth birthday, Tate Modern is blowing its own trumpet. Since May 2000, it boasts, it has received close to 22 million visitors. And between April 2004 and March 2005, the number was 4.15 million, surpassing, for instance, the 3.6 million visitors to the Pompidou Center in Paris during the same period. (It is too early to make a similar comparison to the "new" Museum of Modern Art in New York.) In 2004, 60 percent of Tate Modern's visitors were under 35, and 40 percent were repeat visitors.

So, yes, Sir Nicholas Serota, 59, the Tate's director since 1988 and the man who took the gamble of creating Tate Modern and dividing the Tate's collection into post-1900 international art and British art, has reason to feel vindicated.

Certainly, not everyone has been won over; not Matthew Collings, an independent art critic, who says that hip has become hype. As he recently told BBC Radio, "that the relationship of that museum to art is one of solemn pretentiousness coupled with a sort of inane silliness."

But to those who say people visit the museum mainly to socialize, Sir Nicholas can now afford a dry retort: "It's a kind of myth that, in the 1950's and 1960's, people came to museums only to look at art and now they come only to drink coffee."

The museum's timing was impeccable. From the early 1990's, thanks to the mischievous antics of the so-called Young British Artists like Damien Hirst and Tracey Emin, and the marketing skills of the collector Charles Saatchi, contemporary art became all the rage here. Even tabloid ridicule of the annual Turner Prize - is this art? - kept it in the news. And then Tate Modern appeared, wrapping new art in respectability.

Yet for all its popularity, Tate Modern is still a work in progress, starting with the building itself. "It always takes time for any institution to learn to manipulate the instrument it has created, and it has taken us time, and I think we haven't quite got hold of the building," Sir Nicholas said over coffee in his office in the old Tate Gallery near Westminster, now the Tate Britain. "Some things have worked well. Turbine Hall has been a startling success. But the layout of the galleries can create the sense that you are on a conveyor belt."

One solution is a new extension planned for the south side of the building, he said, to cost an estimated $300 million. Here, he went on, galleries would be designed more as destination spaces than as corridors, not least because they would be displaying less traditional art forms - installations, architecture, video and film - a diversification that, perchance, mirrors the broad mission of the Pompidou Center.

Yet what has really prompted the Tate's trustees to invite the firm of Herzog & de Meuron to design the new extension is, again, success. Sir Nicholas said he had originally imagined a need to seek new space around 2010, but the museum's large crowds - averaging 11,200 a day - made it necessary sooner. Further, the French utilities company Électricité de France Energy, which still occupies part of the building, is planning to upgrade its equipment and will soon be freeing new areas.

But there is another reason. Even more than Shakespeare's Globe Theater, which opened 100 yards away in 1997, Tate Modern has energized this long-neglected Southwark neighborhood. Art galleries and restaurants have sprung up, buildings are being renovated, and new ones are appearing. Nearby, for instance, the Iraqi-born British architect Zaha Hadid is building a new exhibition center for Britain's Architecture Foundation, her first project in London.

"We also have to develop a plan because our neighbors are beginning to come forward with plans for major office and residential buildings and, if all those are completed, they would probably restrict what we could do in the long term," Sir Nicholas said. "We have to tell Southwark what we're planning to do - and we're going to do so this year."

As it happens, the threat of unwanted neighbors is real. A development group has acquired a small property barely 30 yards from the ramp leading down to Turbine Hall, where it plans to build a high-rise that would soar above Tate Modern. Attempts by local residents - and by the Tate - to block the project have so far failed, but a residents' association has now taken the case to the European Court of Human Rights.

Still, for all the talk of real estate, what about the art? Sir Nicholas has long tired of conceding that Tate Modern's early-20th-century collection is weak, especially compared with the Modern's in New York and the Pompidou's in Paris. "We obviously can't fill these holes other than by a gift from an individual collection," he explained, "and in this country, at least, there are not big collectors. What we can do, however, is to try to acquire major works from the 1970's, 1980's and 1990's. Of course the market pushes up prices, particularly in the United States, but there are opportunities."

The Tate empire as a whole - Tate Modern, Tate Britain, Tate Liverpool and Tate St. Ives - has only about $8 million to spend each year on new acquisitions. Sir Nicholas has therefore looked for donations by leading British artists. So far, with pledges from 30 artists, 8 works have been delivered.

In the meantime, Tate Modern will rotate art from its permanent collection every six years, with the first new display scheduled for next year.

Vicente Todoli, the museum's director, said somewhat murkily: "It will be neither thematic nor chronological, although in some areas the public will sense time, and other areas may suggest themes. It will have a lot do with movements of art, confrontations, hubs, cross-sections. But it will start from the strengths of the collection, not from an idea."

When it comes to temporary exhibitions, Tate Modern has an advantage. It naturally counts on blockbusters to fill its cash box, and it is looking to its new Frida Kahlo retrospective, which was to open on June 9, to pull in the crowds. But with smaller shows, it is also introducing the art of non-Britons like Giorgio Morandi, Sigmar Polke, Luc Tuymans and Arte Povera artists, to the public here.

That these shows are also popular is a measure of the remarkable awakening to modern and contemporary art in Britain today. And in promoting this interest, Tate Modern is accompanied by the Whitechapel Gallery, the Serpentine Gallery and the Royal Academy of Arts (which presented the infamous 1997 "Sensation!" show by Young British Artists from Mr. Saatchi's collection). But Tate Modern is the proof that modern art has come here to stay.

"The success of Tate Modern has been so complete and so far-reaching that it takes an effort to remember a time when it did not exist," Richard Dorment, the respected art critic of The Daily Telegraph of London, wrote in his anniversary tribute. "Today, London is acknowledged to be the center of the art world, a role that once belonged to Paris and then New York."

So, Sir Nicholas was asked, did he now intend to follow the Guggenheim Museum of New York and the Pompidou in expanding his empire abroad?

"The empire is built," he replied with a smile.

He sounded convincing. More or less.

Art, Money and Power

By MICHAEL KIMMELMAN

Published: May 11, 2005

We had "Sensation" at the Brooklyn Museum, a gift to Charles Saatchi, whose collection it advertised, and shows at the Whitney of artists (Robert Rauschenberg and Agnes Martin come to mind) virtually packaged by the gallery that represents them. The Museum of Fine Arts in Boston has been renting its Monets to a casino in Las Vegas, while the Guggenheim, which gave us the atrocious "Armani," an even more egregious paid advertisement, is spending resources shopping itself around the globe while canceling shows here at home.

Every year, in one way or another, museums test the public's faith in their integrity. When P.S. 1 unveiled "Greater New York" some weeks back, the exhibition turned out to be a shallow affair in thrall to the booming art market. No one really should have expected otherwise from an event timed to coincide with the city's big contemporary-art fair. Meanwhile, P.S. 1's institutional parent, the Museum of Modern Art, the spanking new headquarters of Modernism Inc., inaugurated its exhibition program with an appalling paean to a corporate sponsor's blue-chip collection. This gave the financial services company, UBS, an excuse to plaster the city with advertisements that made MoMA seem like its tool and minor subsidiary. You can only imagine how that went over with another of the Modern's sponsors, J. P. Morgan, UBS's rival.

Now comes the Met with its current Chanel-sponsored Chanel show, a fawning trifle that resembles a fancy showroom. Sparsely outfitted with white cube display boxes and a bare minimum of meaningful text, this absurdly uncritical exhibition puts Coco's designs alongside work by the current monarch of the House of Chanel, Karl Lagerfeld.

A few years ago, a Chanel show was put off by the Met's director, Philippe de Montebello, because Mr. Lagerfeld wanted to interfere. It makes no difference whether he had a direct hand in it this time or, as the museum keeps insisting, was kept at arm's length from the curatorial process: the impression is the same, and impressions count when it comes to the reputation of a museum.

Museums deal in two kinds of currency, after all: the quality of their collections and public trust. Squander one, and the other suffers. People visit MoMA or the Met to see great art; they will even consider art that they don't know or don't like as great because the museum says so. But this delicate cultural ecosystem depends on the public's perception that museums make independent judgments - that they're not just shilling for trustees or politicians or sponsors.

Naturally, the public wonders whose pockets are greased by what a museum shows, because there's so much money involved in art. But this question can be subordinated if the museum proves that it's acting in the public's interest, and not someone else's. In turn, museums can call on the public. The New York Public Library is auctioning some American art, including a couple of Gilbert Stuarts and an Asher B. Durand that has been a civic landmark for many decades. Some New York museum ought to end up with the picture but will have to rally public enthusiasm swiftly - it will have to bank on public trust.

Of course, this is the real world. Museums need trustees to cover the bills. They depend on galleries and collectors and sponsors and artists for help. Last year, the Modigliani retrospective at the Jewish Museum had a ridiculous painting that turned out to belong to a trustee who insisted it be included. No exhibition of a living artist avoids some negotiation (read: compromise) with the artist or the artist's dealer. The artist or the dealer may demand that this picture, not that one, be shown; that new work be stressed; that a certain collector's holdings be favored; or that the show's catalog be written in a certain way. It's the cost of doing business.

But there are degrees of compromise. Some years back, the National Gallery in Washington presented a show of the collection put together by a Swiss industrialist, Emil Bührle, with a catalog overseen by his heirs that celebrated his "inner flame" for art but made no mention of the fact that his fortune came partly from dealing arms to the Nazis, or that his son, who owned many of the works, was convicted of illegal arms sales. Only the most scrupulous reader of the fine print would have noticed that a Renoir once belonged to Hermann Göring.

The show was about Bührle, so the public could expect to learn who he was. The Chanel show avoids mentioning her activities during the war, when she maintained a life in Paris as the lover of an SS officer and, according to her biographer, Janet Wallach, tried to exploit Nazi laws to wrest control of her perfume business from her Jewish partners. No doubt, the Bührle show would never have happened if the National Gallery had emphasized how Bührle sold arms to the Nazis, and I suspect Chanel would not have been very happy about sponsoring this show if the Met had been more forthcoming about its founder's wartime history.

Is such information irrelevant to what's on view? It depends.

The public should decide. The Caravaggio exhibition at the National Gallery in London makes clear that he was a murderer. His violent personality explains something about his later work. It would have been irresponsible for the exhibition not to mention it.

Trust us, museums say: the rules need to bend, and we know how much bending is enough and how much is too much. In a curious way, commercial galleries are in a better position. We see where they're coming from. Frank Lloyd Wright had a saying. At an early age he made a choice between "honest arrogance and hypocritical humility." He picked arrogance. Galleries are honest about wanting to sell you something. Museums often traffic in moral hypocrisy - and are then exploited for their presumptive lofty independence. Chanel couldn't have bought better publicity.

As for the Met, it says something that it would allow itself to play this role, just as it says something about the Modern that its first big exhibition seemed like a corporate payoff.

At least MoMA gets something. The museum will get art from UBS. Mr. Saatchi made millions recently selling Damien Hirst's shark, whose value was enhanced by the notoriety of "Sensation." All Brooklyn got was grief.

An Artist's Gallery of Ideas: Chris Ofili's Watercolors

By CAROL VOGEL

Published: May 5, 2005

There are no Madonnas in "Chris Ofili: Afro Muses 1995-2005," an exhibition of more than 180 watercolors. Nor is there any elephant dung.

Mr. Ofili's first one-man show in New York may surprise museumgoers who have not seen his work since 1999, when a painting of a black Madonna with a clump of elephant dung on one breast caused an uproar. Denouncing the Ofili work among others as "sick stuff," Rudolph W. Giuliani, then the mayor, threatened to cut off the city subsidy to the Brooklyn Museum, where the painting was featured in "Sensation: Young British Artists From the Saatchi Collection."

Chris Ofili/Courtesy of David Zwirner

One of Chris Ofili's imaginary portraits of women, featured in his show "Afro Muses 1995-2005," at the Studio Museum in Harlem.

Chris Ofili

A part of "The Gardener."

Librado Romero/The New York Times

Chris Ofili at the Studio Museum in Harlem during the installation of "Afro Muses 1995-2005," his show of the watercolors he has been privately doing for years.

Mr. Ofili, 37, says he has put all that behind him. And since that imbroglio, his career has steadily risen: he represented Britain at the Venice Biennale two years ago, and his work has entered the permanent collections of museums like the Tate in London and the Museum of Modern Art.

Yet with "Afro Muses," at the Studio Museum in Harlem, viewers finally get a peek at the way he works and thinks.

For 10 years now, Mr. Ofili has been making watercolors, each about 9½ by 6½ inches and produced in a single sitting. Predominantly heads of men and women, as well as some studies of flowers and birds, they are his way of unlocking ideas that may eventually become full-blown paintings.

"I've always had this intimate relationship with drawing," Mr. Ofili said in an interview at the Studio Museum, surveying dozens of watercolors that were about to be hung on the gallery walls. "They're a springboard."

While his paintings can take anywhere from a few months to a few years to complete, watercolors, he says, are a form of "instant gratification."

Thelma Golden, director and chief curator of the Studio Museum, called the exhibition "a curator's dream." Rather than having to approach dozens of different collectors and museums to put the show together, she secured all 181 works from a single source: the artist.

Over the years, Mr. Ofili steadily squirreled the watercolors away in a box in his studio, pulling out this one or that one whenever he was seeking inspiration.

Ms. Golden said nobody knew the collection existed until she went to Mr. Ofili's studio in London two years ago to interview him for a catalog essay on the work that was to be shown in Venice. While discussing the paintings, he began showing her some examples of their genesis - the watercolors.

"That's when my curator's radar went off," Ms. Golden said. "I never imagined he had this corpus of work. He had no plans for them because they had never left his studio."

The works, on view at the Studio Museum through July 3, now fill the main gallery. All the men and women depicted are whimsical in their expressions and their dress. The women, rendered mostly in three-quarter poses, are clad in colorful costumes with richly painted jewelry and somewhat fantastical hairdos. The men are generally shown in profile, some with ornate beards and decorative African-style garb.

As real as they seem, none of these people exist. They all grew out of Mr. Ofili's imagination. Some are inspired by images he spotted in magazines or on television or conjured up from subconscious impressions absorbed on the street or at a party.

Ms. Golden and Mr. Ofili have grouped many of the watercolors in an irregular grid across the gallery. "Since they're mostly people," Ms. Golden said, "we imagined them as a crowd."

The walls have been painted a tan shade Mr. Ofili chose for its calming effect. That hue is repeated in one of the mats in each frame.

On the side walls is a series of faces that Mr. Ofili calls "Harems." Each arrangement consists of one man with as many as four women on each side of him. Asked why he chose the configuration, he said, "They were destined to be together."

There is also a series of women with white lips that he calls "The Unkissed."

"I always loved the idea that lips would blush if kissed," he said. Hanging below the "Unkissed," are five suitors, all bearded and wearing what seems like regal garb. Each has the same face. "They're pretty much the same bearded guy," Mr. Ofili said.

One of the most unusual groups of watercolors in the show, titled "The Gardener," jointly depicts a man surrounded by five colorful birds perched on branches and three blooming flowers.

Asked whether the gardener exists, Mr. Ofili replied, "I'm sure somewhere."

Head made of blood sold by Saatchi for profit of £1,487,000

By Arifa Akbar
Thursday, 21 April 2005

Marc Quinn's famous sculpture moulded with eight pints of his own blood was regarded as one of the signature pieces of the Young British Artists when the new Saatchi Gallery opened less than two years ago.

Marc Quinn's famous sculpture moulded with eight pints of his own blood was regarded as one of the signature pieces of the Young British Artists when the new Saatchi Gallery opened less than two years ago.

Now Charles Saatchi, the gallery owner and one-time patron of the YBAs, has sold the work, Self, to an American collector for £1.5m, further fuelling rumours that his love affair with the movement is at an end.

Saatchi bought it in 1991 when Quinn was relatively unknown and its sale is thought to have earned him a profit of £1,487,000.

The sale follows a period of artistic overhaul for Saatchi. In January this year, the unmade beds and sharks in formaldehyde which had drawn visitors to his gallery in County Hall, London, were swapped for oil paintings owned by Saatchi, in a year-long exhibition called The Triumph of Painting.

While the gallery remains tight-lipped about the future of pieces which once heralded a new wave of daring, often shocking, British conceptual art, many works have already been sold.

Damien Hirst bought back several of his own works from Saatchi in 2003, for a reported £7.8m. These included a sliced pig in formaldehyde, This Little Piggy went to Market, which alone was valued at £1.5m. Hirst's seminal work, The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living, a shark in formaldehyde which became emblematic of the YBA generation, was sold for a reported £6.25m in January this year.

Saatchi is thought to have parted with one of his favourite pieces by Hirst, a sheep in formaldehyde, entitled Away from the Flock, for £2.1m. He has also sold Rachel Whiteread's elegiac piece Ghost, as well as Ron Muerk's sculpture Dead Dad which appeared in the central space of Saatchi's gallery at County Hall.

Many art critics have taken Saatchi's reconfiguration of his gallery to signify the death of the YBA movement, which rose to such prominence a decade ago. Others have suggested that he is cashing in on the works that he helped to make famous to finance his latest passion for paintings.

But Anna Somers Cocks, editor-in-chief of The Art Newspaper, said that although Saatchi helped to make the work of the YBAs fashionable, his latest move would not sound the death knell for the conceptual art of that generation.

"If these artists are still fetching good prices, it means there are a whole variety of people buying them," she said. "I don't think we will find that just because Saatchi has sold a few pieces, that prices will fall. It does not depend on one art collector. The market for contemporary art is very wide in Europe and America and it is a well supported market. Damien Hirst is considered a YBA and his prices are going higher and higher. There are enough other buyers out there to prove there is interest."

Some art experts believe the sale of extraordinary works that Saatchi amassed in the 1990s will, on reflection, be a huge mistake.

Quinn's self portrait, Self, created in 1991, was made from blood taken from him over a period of five months. The blood was poured into a negative mould of the artist's head and frozen. This cast was exhibited in a glass container set on top of a refrigeration unit at the Saatchi Gallery from 1992 until last year.

The piece has subsequently become a touchstone for a particular brand of art of the body and is regarded as a sensitive meditation on mortality and the fragility of life. Rumours of it melting after workmenreportedly pulled the plug on a refrigerator have prolonged the notoriety and visibility of the work

A spokeswoman for the Saatchi Gallery confirmed that Quinn's sculpture had been sold. But a statement added: "Saatchi has been the biggest buyer of contemporary art over the last two years. He has set record prices for many artists in auction."

Saatchi's other sales

* Damien Hirst's shark, The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living, is believed to have been sold to a US collector, Steven Cohen, for a figure of between £6m and £7m. Saatchi bought it for £50,000 in 1991.

* Rachel Whiteread's Ghost, a sculpture from 1990, was a plaster cast of a living room modelled on a house in north London similar to the one she grew up in. It was sold for an unknown amount.

* Damien Hirst repurchased up to 12 of the works that Saatchi collected at the beginning of the artist's career for a rumoured £7.8m including This Little Piggy Went To Market, from 1996.

* Away From The Flock, also by Hirst, is believed to have been sold for £2.1m.

* Four works by Ron Muerk are believed to have been sold including Dead Dad, Angel, Mask and Pinocchio.

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.