June 25, 2018 Issue

In this week’s “Goings On About Town,” Peter Schjeldahl shoots a poison-tipped dart at Damien Hirst’s Colour Space Paintings, currently showing at Gagosian Gallery, New York City. He writes,

Superabundant multicolored dot paintings, randomly composed in sizes from smallish to giant, are as perfectly dead as a trisected shark in formaldehyde-filled glass cases, which is also on view. There’s no formal structure or even optical dazzle, except by occasional accident. These aren’t active pictures. They’re passive slabs, yielding nothing to contemplation that they don’t impart at first glance. Neither good nor bad, they maintain an imperturbable, mortuary dignity—Hirst’s cynosure. He creates visual curios that look like art while dispensing with art’s pesky demands on thought, feeling, and perception. His works are aesthetic cryptocurrency. There are worse things in the world.

Wow! I’ve rarely seen Schjeldahl so negative. But it’s not unexpected. He’s been on Hirst’s case for years. In his “Spot On” (January 12, 2012), he called him “a peculiarly cold-blooded pet of millennial excess wealth.” I agree. 

Schjeldahl’s “Goings On About Town” note is even more dismissive of Hirst’s dot paintings than “Spot On” is. In the earlier piece, he memorably describes them as ‘intellectual formaldehyde.” But he also said, “Tastiness applies, too, in the pleasantly disorienting effects of colors that appear to be distributed at random: bright or muted or warm or cool, all ajumble.” Well, there’s no tastiness now. They’re “aesthetic cryptocurrency” – a brilliant description of bad art that went straight into my personal anthology of great New Yorker criticism.