Damien Hirst at Gagosian

Damien Hirst
”Forgiving and Forgetting”
Gagosian, West 24th Street, New York City
January 20 - February 26

Before this show opened the fact that Hirst didn’t actually sell that skull was trotted out as a major gotcha. Who cares. He made it, he did it. Sold or not he made the discovery that decrepit and withered capital can still play like a puppy given the right toy, and it can still tell that one, single, immovable truth: we’re all gonna die. 

This is why Treasures from the Wreck of the Unbelievable and this current monstrosity at Gagosian just don’t hit the way his earlier work did. Here he is concerned not with the inevitability of death but what comes after. He isn’t defiantly conjuring the image of mortality, he’s shrugging his shoulders and accepting it. These bodies of work deal in alternative histories and the material of age, which is more often an additive growth of corals and conchs than a subtractive process of decay, a process absolutely anathema to Hirst. 

Damien Hirst is brilliant because, when he succeeds, his work looks like nothing else in the world, even when it does. He is likely the last contemporary artist, the last modern to really render life in material in a compellingly novel way.

This isn’t exactly one of those moments. The paintings are good to the extent that they manage not to exactly be paintings: they’re more like slabs taken off a stuccoed wall or the shrines of chewed gum one finds on university canvases. But they’re too self-conscious of their centers. The marks shrink from the corners and collapse into the middle like a body on an old mattress.

I appreciate that here he’s given up the safe ballast of antiquity that anchored Treasures to go all in on contemporary(ish) kitsch, but Disney is titan even he can’t really wrangle. The artist cannot appropriate Mickey Mouse; Mickey Mouse appropriates the artist. The rose quartz renditions are compelling because the stone has cracked and broken but the other statuary is a bore. The coral might as well be 3-d printed from a Disney animator’s rendition of it. Like so many long-lasting childhood classics Disney kitsch exists not so much in historical time but in individual memory, naive and out of time, and this show, with it's one periwinkle wall and bubblegum canvases feels an awful lot like a Nordstrom’s children’s department.

He’s tailing here. I suspect this is what he thinks the market wants. He might be right on that count, given contemporary taste that thinks Banksy is subversive and puts Kaws in the Brooklyn museum. But he’s much better when he foists upon the market what it deserves, whether it wants it or not.