Has Hirst Finally Passed His Best-Before Date?

I have written many times in many places how much I dislike nearly all of Damien Hirst’s oeuvre. And I have been rewarded by having to watch him become the first art billionaire. But finally, the hens may be coming home to roost. Look at these reviews of his latest exhibition…

Rachel Campbell-Jones: “The paintings are dreadful. Think Francis Bacon meets Adrian Mole. So why are these works now hanging in the Wallace Collection? What are they doing in the home of such masters as Rembrandt or Poussin, Titian or Fragonard? The answer is simple: they are by Damien Hirst. Take a step farther and a pale, silk-papered boudoir transforms into what feels more like a teenage boy’s bedroom. You can almost smell the brooding odours of existential angst. The artist who has made his reputation with shock now produces works that are shockingly bad.“

Tom Lubbock: “Damien Hirst has painted some paintings, entirely by hand. So far he has made his name with other kinds of art: with assemblages, mainly involving dead animals and pills, and paintings, painted by other people. But now he has risked his fame, with some paintings done by his own hand. 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. He is in his mid-forties. “

Sarah Crompton: “The problems with the exhibition begin when you study the paintings themselves. 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. So it is brave of him to begin to paint in this way — but anyone who first encountered Hirst through these works would be entirely justified in wondering what all the fuss had been about.”

Adrian Searle: “Damien Hirst’s paintings are deadly dull … Hirst’s paintings lack the kind of theatricality and grandeur that made Bacon succeed. At its worst, Hirst’s drawing just looks amateurish and adolescent. His brushwork lacks that oomph and panache that makes you believe in the painter’s lies. He can’t yet carry it off. Whatever his borrowings, Hirst did all this himself, unaided by his armies of assistants. He fills up his art with dead things: even the iguanas look stuffed. But these paintings are a memento mori for a reputation.”

Hirst can of course ignore these reviews with a shake of his heavily-laden bank accounts.  But it must hurt, nonetheless.

The next day, the New York Times was asking whether Conceptual Art had jumped the shark tank?  As Dennis Dutton writes:  “I can’t help regarding medicine cabinets, vacuum cleaners and dead sharks as reckless investments. Somewhere out there in collectorland is the unlucky guy who will be the last one holding the vacuum cleaner, and wondering why.”

Auction Update

Christie’s Post-War and Contemporary Sale is going on as I blog.

Lucian Freud’s small painting of “Girl Reading” just about reached its estimates, selling for $3.8million.  And his iconic portrait of “Francis Bacon” barely crept over the lower estimates to fetch $9.4 million.  A third work, “Susie” didn’t sell.  Francis Bacon’s own “Portrait of Henrietta Moraes“, with pre-sales estimates between $9.5 million and $13 million, also appears not to have sold.

A number of Warhols are  being left on the shelf; presumably they didn’t meet their required minimums, and two Gerhard Richter’s also failed to sell.

The three new Chinese artists who were on display had mixed fortunes.  Yang Pei Ming failed to sell his “Autoportrait“, and a work by Yue Minjun sold for a few points less than the anticipated minimum.  However, Zeng Fanzhi almost doubled his estimate, selling an untitled work for $500,000.

To set my teeth on edge, it seems that Lucio Fontana is going to be the star of this show.   One of his la fine de Dio series just sold for an astonishing $15.6 million!   I really must be missing something.  The Inflated Phrases for this one include:

“Lucio Fontana’s Fine di Dio are a series of thirty-eight oval-shaped oil paintings made between March 1963 and February 1964 for three different exhibitions of his work held in Zurich, Milan and Paris. The supreme encapsulation of the ‘Spatialist’ art that he pioneered in the 1950s and ’60s, these works now stand as mystical icons that since their creation have proved themselves to be strangely prophetic of much about the way that modern physicists now view the cosmos.  Strange, mysterious and imposing, these punctured monochrome canvases in the shape of an egg are more than mere paintings. They are ‘Spatial concepts’ that invoke the fundamental mystery of the cosmos…”

On the other hand, I love Richard Prince’s “Dude Ranch Nurse #2” and I’m glad to see it reach $5.5 million.  I wonder if that is a record for him?

Almost at the end, a Damien Hirst medicine chest called “Untitled AAAAAAA” was left unsold after pre-sale estimates of around $400,000.

In all, the show had a value of around $50million.  But 19 of the 45 lots were left unsold, and I am sure that must be a disappointment.  Was it just the quality of the auction? Or is this a sign that money is tighter than it has been?  Hard to say yet.

Lucian The Small

The next auction that I have an interest in is at Christies, London, on October 19th.  It is a sale of “Post-War and Contemporary Art“.

The first thing that struck me from the catalog were the Notes attached to Jeff Koon’s “Jim Beam Log Car” (estimate up to $1.6m).  They are the epitome of the Inflated Phrases we have discussed before.

But the real treat comes as early as Lot 9:  “Girl Reading“, Lucian Freud’s portait of Lady Caroline Blackwood.

We are used to Freud’s massive images, but this is a tiny 8″ x 6″.

It still took an age to paint.  Blackwood has described sitting for Freud:  “Not only it is slow, but after six months you can be back to where you started. He not only paints the anguish of your age but he also paints the anguish of his sitters” (C. Blackwood, quoted in S. Aronson, Sophisticated Lady, p. 146).

And the pre-sale estimates for this almost-miniature run from $3.5 million to $5.2 million.

A little larger, at 14″ x 14″, is Freud’s portrait of the other giant, Francis Bacon from 1956/7.  The pre-sale estimate for this historic image goes up to $12.3 million.

The catalog also includes a number of works from young Chinese artists, some basic Warhols, along with works by Gerhard Richter, Lucio Fontana, Damien Hirst, Takashi Murakami and others.  It will be interesting to see if the “financial meltdown” has any effect on this end of the market.   I don’t expect it to.

What Price Genuine?

The day after Damien Hirst’s garage sale, art dealer Richard Feigen wrote an interesting piece about the dearth of connoisseurship and the rise of the factory.  He begins with an acknowledgment that the definition of art was revolutionized by Marcel Duchamp when,

he decreed that the term included found objects, that art need involve only the artist’s choice, not his hand—that the idea is the art. Now that can be true if the idea is profound enough, or the object beautiful enough … Once we accept that the artist’s hand is no longer necessary, only his idea, it’s a short leap to market the concept that beauty is not only no longer essential, it can even be turned into a dirty, “elitist” word.

This in turn has led gto the death of connoisseurship:

Connoisseurship is the identification of the artist by his handwriting. But if his hand isn’t there, the handwriting isn’t, and connoisseurship becomes a dead old discipline. Who needs connoisseurs? Why train them? Why not train museum director-administrators-fundraisers-construction supervisors?

… The artist can simply hatch an idea. Then comes the collaboration of an army of profiteers in “collectors’” clothes; of hungry auctioneers; of empire-building dealers; of trendy museum curators; a press bedazzled by mega-millions flooding in from every corner of the globe—art then has truly been transformed into an “asset class”

The end result is that

any image can be “copyrighted” if an artist gets there with it first. From Roy Lichtenstein’s Ben-day dots and Andy Warhol’s silkscreens, it’s a short leap to Jeff Koons’ or Damien Hirst’s or Takashi Murakami’s factories turning the stuff out.  Shock value is enough for a copyright, whether it’s a putrefying shark or a platinum, diamond-studded neo-Augsburg memento mori or a three-dimensional cartoon or a huge, shiny toy dog.

And how, he asks, can we now tell the artist’s true handwriting?  How will be establish “fake” from “real” art?  He concludes that,

with “art” proliferating and the stakes so high, there may … be big rewards in store for the litigators.

Damien Hirst’s Garage Sale

Tomorrow (the 16th) is the major part of the auction of new works by Damien Hirst at Sotheby’s in London.  The auction, called “Beautiful Inside My Head For Ever“, essentially makes the auction house the artist’s gallery.  The art world is watching this experiment closely.  Tonight’s evening sale raised an incredible 70 million pounds (including more than 9 million pounds for The Kingdom, a shark in formaldahyde.)

I’ve written several times before how little I appreciate Hirst’s work and, after studying all of tomorrow’s 167 lots, my opinion has not changed.  I don’t appreciate the dead animals in formaldehyde, and I think that most of the butterfly works are mechanical.  I discovered four pieces that I like: lots 121, 136, 201 and 276.  And it has to be said that 136 and 201 in particular reveal the brilliant execution he has as a super-realist.

But…

Art For Sale

It used to be that direct sales of paintings by artists conjured up either the tawdry image of TV ads shouting “Canvases from $12!  Genuine oils!” or the quaint amateur airs of the county fair, eager watercolors in a small tent.  It used to be, but Damien Hirst is about to change all that.

In a move designed to shake the very foundations of the artist – agent/gallery connection that has driven the business for so long, Damien Hirst’s factory-like enterprise has assigned an entire suite of new works to Sotheby’s in London for exhibition and sale.

Hirst is said to regard the step of offering new material at auction as a logical development in his career but the broader implications of his decision are profound. It is widely known that auction houses have courted the emerging markets of China and India. Leading names without a firm gallery representation in London or New York have been encouraged to consign works to its catalogues. Furthermore, artists such as Jeff Koons and David Hammons have, in exceptional circumstances, placed new or historic work in auctions in order to maximise value or circumvent a dealer obligation.

But Hirst has crossed the market’s Rubicon with a gambit which opens a new front for an admittedly very special situation: an artist with brand name recognition and a factory enterprise capable of producing a completely new series of seasonal variations to order. At a stroke, the judicious management of an artist’s career by an agent who identifies which favoured collectors will be permitted to acquire material in conditions of secrecy gives way to the triumph of the highest bidder on the public stage. Now that Damien has demolished the moral barrier of using auctions for distribution and profit, other artists will follow suit.

The centerpiece of the show — entitled “Beautiful Inside My Head Forever — in September will be “The Golden Calf” which is estimated at $16m to $25m.

I’ve written before of my serious distaste for Hirst and his works, but he has certainly done remarkably well for himself.  Well enough that he could pay $33m for a Francis Bacon self portrait last November, and follow it up with a $3m Koons doodad this February.  All purchases again through Sothebys, who have become in effect his gallery.

Christies’ Sale

This evening’s sale at Christies in London brought a total of $175 million.   As I mentioned in an earlier post, the market for art seems only to strengthen as other financial instruments get weaker.

Unfortunately, whatever serious critics and I might say, Jeff Koons continues to prosper mightily.  His absurdly juvenile “Balloon Flower (Magenta)” was sold for $25.6 million, which is I believe a record for the artist. Christies calls it a “masterpiece”!

The fact that one of Damien Hirst’s pieces failed to meet its over-extended minimum supplies only partial consolation.

On the other hand Francis Bacon’s “3 Studies For A Self-Portrait” from 1975, sold for a very impressive $34.3 million.  Lucian Freud’s “Naked Portrait With Reflection” was perhaps a little disappointing at $23.4 million (the estimate was up to $30m).

Art As Fart (Part 2)

I have in passing mentioned my disdain for quite a bit of contemporary “conceptual” art.  I described one show as being “[l]ike a fart; it was unpleasant to be around, but the memory quickly fades in fresh air.”  I have trouble seeing the work of Jeff Koons or Damien Hirst as anything but marketing manipulations, and their influence seems malign. It is good to have it confirmed that I am not alone.

Jed Perl, art critic of The New Republic, has come out swinging in a long article called “Postcards From Nowhere“, which is his review of five major new exhibitions.

What there is to discuss is not visual experiences so much as visual stunts, which are frequently mind-boggling in their size and complexity. Mostly what I can offer, after all this museum going and gallery going, is a series of postcards about nothing written from places that felt like nowhere … It is the artists, and a certain line of thinking about art, that have given the people with the cash permission to buy and sell what amounts to nothing, and to do so for ever larger and more insane sums of money …

He complains vigourously about

the laissez-faire aesthetics that give collectors sanction to regard one of Jeff Koons’s stainless-steel balloon animals as simultaneously a camp joke and a modern equivalent of a Tang dynasty horse. (A critic in The New York Times described one of these glistening metal doggies, currently on display on the roof of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, as a “masterpiece.”)

… Koons is mostly concerned with massaging the egos of gallerygoers and museumgoers–and, of course, high-end collectors. He knows how to cozy up to his constituency. Those of us who are outraged that Koons and Hirst and Murakami now take up so much space in our museums are not angered by their work. We are angered by the significance that arts professionals are attaching to this work. There is no art here to enrage me–or to engage me, either.

He is particularly sharp against Takashi Turakami, currently enjoying a retrospective in Los Angeles.

In the case of Takashi Murakami … you cannot possibly understand what a safe haven for frauds and con artists the art world has become until you have walked into this trickster’s trap … the work is all shell, all facade, all empty assertion.

And he notes the baleful influence of the new style on the physical buildings.

This helps to explain the poorly defined character of so many new museums and galleries. These exhibition spaces, whether the Broad Contemporary Art Museum in Los Angeles or the New Museum in New York, are as incoherent as the art they have been designed to house. They are bland, generic warehouse-style spaces–places to dump expensive stuff. And the new style in exhibition design, especially at the Whitney Biennial, favors a chockablock look, with works set in front of one another so that nothing can be experienced in and of itself.

There is a great deal more of meaty discussion in the article.  For anyone interested in contemporary art and its markets, It is well worth the time it takes to read.

Update:   It is clear, however, that in New York at least, the conceptual monster is still loose on the streets and waterways.