Hirst, Globally Dotting His 'I' - New York Times

Librado Romero/The New York Times

Damien Hirst's "Zinzadze Reagent" (2002), one of the artist's spot paintings at Gagosian Gallery on West 24th Street.

Thanks to the Gagosian art empire, a ludicrous number of paintings by Damien Hirst are on display right now: 331 of Mr. Hirst’s implacably cheerful “spot” abstractions spread among Gagosian’s 11 galleries in 8 cities on 3 continents.

The good news, of course, is that they’re not all in one place. And none involve dead animals, maggots, encrusted diamonds or vats of formaldehyde. They’re mostly just grids of repeating, neatly made circles, each a different color. How bad can it be?

Well, very bad at times, and yet, at others, not bad at all, in fact rather good. In New York, where 115 of the 331 are on view in the three Gagosian galleries in the city, the quality of the art â€" and the experience of it â€" varies tremendously. Parts of Hirst New York are both visually exhilarating and accessible; you can take the kids, take friends who have never looked at art or acquaintances curious about the formal principles of abstraction. Then there are parts so redundant and oppressive as to appeal to only hard-core Hirst devotees. The New York allotment, at least, is a sideshow but one with redeeming qualities, a spectacle with benefits, which is a lot more than can be said of Mr. Hirst’s previous attention-getting shenanigans, like the all-Hirst auctions or the bejeweled skull.

Am I grading on a curve? Probably. Undoubtedly the usual knickers will be twisted by Mr. Hirst’s latest grandstanding: He’s so unimaginative, so crassly commercial, not a real artist and so forth. Mr. Hirst is the post-Warhol, post-Barnum epitome of the artist as impresario, public relations strategist, graphic designer and art director. You can find precedents for just about all of his actions in previous generations. Multiple-city gallery shows have been around since the 1980s; many artists have overproduced, and most are publicity minded. But he has rolled all this, and more, into one big, messy contradictory ball of wax and pushed it to extremes in ways that regularly drive people nuts.

On one level, the Hirst à Gogo is a blatant promotion of both the Hirst and Gagosian brands, and a sitting-duck symbol of the end-time, we’re-doing-this-because-we-can decadence that has subsumed so much of the art world â€" yet another instance of money celebrating itself. The show is titled “Damien Hirst the Complete Spot Paintings 1986-2011,” and would that this were so. There are more than 1,500 of these things in existence; evidently they will all be accommodated in the show’s catalog, which will live up to the title. (This is not a tome I look forward to paging through.)

But the spot-painting project is more complicated, even paradoxical. It challenges you to hold opposing ideas at the same time. Alongside the promotional character of the undertaking is an aspect of goofy honesty, generosity and even full disclosure. Mr. Hirst, or his assistants, have been making a lot of these paintings; so why not show a lot of them?

The global presentation brings to mind a worldwide rollout for the latest iWhatever. Yet it also reminds me of a weird, commercial version of the Christos’ “Gates” in Central Park, only more spread out, with a lot less orange and greater visual interest. Over the next month or so people in New York, London, Paris, Geneva, Rome, Athens, Hong Kong and Beverly Hills can go to a Gagosian outpost and have a similar Hirst experience. Suggestion: Maybe Gagosian could enhance the collective nature of the experience by having all the galleries stay open around the clock.

Not surprisingly the overblown, up-and-down quality of the whole extravaganza mirrors Mr. Hirst’s overblown, up-and-down career. Yet this is somewhat paradoxical given the narrow focus here. He is showing nothing but fields of enamel dots, smooth discs of color applied to white canvases in orderly grids at intervals equal to the diameter of the discs. The discs can be any color, except the colors can’t repeat on any given canvas (though they come extremely close), and the people making the paintings choose the colors.

The relentless evenness of formula and technique reflects Mr. Hirst’s stated desire to make paintings that seem to have been made by a machine. Yet what’s striking is the unevenness, the variations of touch and finish, and the way that even within their narrow confines the spot paintings do the usual Hirst thing: that is, they range from good to atrocious. Some of them are wonderful; some aren’t really paintings, they’re just expanses of inert spots that happen to be hanging in a gallery. The fluctuations in quality is itself a kind of affirmation of the whole idea of quality.

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