You’re stuffed: Britain’s critics tell Hirst he has jumped the shark
By Clare Morgan | smh.com.au | 16 October
Out of love ... Damien Hirst with one of his paintings. Photo: Reuters
Damien Hirst must be wishing he’d stuck with the pickled sharks.
The man who has made millions from headline-grabbing conceptual works – including sheep and sharks in formaldehyde, and diamond-encrusted skulls – has received a critical pasting for an exhibition of his paintings at the august Wallace Collection in London.
Hirst, famous for employing an army of helpers to produce his expensive artworks, spent two years in a studio to produce the 25 paintings for No Love Lost,which he says reflects a man confronting his mortality.
Yesterday he was confronting one of the most unanimously negative responses to any British exhibition in memory.
Tom Lubbock led the charge in The Independent. ‘‘They’re thoroughly derivative. Their handling is weak. They’re extremely boring. Hirst, as a painter, is at about the level of a not-very-promising,first-year art student.’’
Sarah Crompton, in London’s Daily Telegraph, admired the dazzling effect of lining up the 25 blue-hued paintings along two walls covered with striped blue silk wallpaper.
But it was downhill from there: “Although they have impact as a group, individually many of the paintings simply don’t pass muster.
Details are tentatively painted;compositions fall apart under scrutiny.” Adrian Searle wrote in The Guardian: “At its worst, Hirst’s drawing just looks amateurish and adolescent.”
In The Times Rachel Campbell-Johnston sniffed: “The paintings are dreadful. Think Francis Bacon meets Adrian Mole.”
Many saw it as an emperorhas-no-clothes moment for the self-styled ‘‘bad boy’’ of British art. But the Telegraph commentator Mark Hudson thought it suggested a welcome shift in the zeitgeist.
‘‘While little difference may have been made to the overall trajectory ofHirst’s career – or more specifically his prices – it is heartening to see that the world, or those aspects of it represented by the British media, retains a lot more integrity than many would have given it credit for.’’
First published by Smh.com.au on October 16 2009
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