Damien Hirst: Point, kinda counterpoint
Spot paintings!
From The Guardian
For a while, coloured spots signalled a fresh, sophisticated, zesty new Britain. Whether Hirst had much to do with this is uncertain. No one owns the spot, although designer appropriations always remind you of Hirst, or of the Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama, who has been covering her work, and her body, in polka dots for 60 years. (Kusama is at Tate Modern next month.) US artist Ellsworth Kelly was also arranging grids of colours in the 1950s, while Germany’s Gerhard Richter has been painting colour charts and squares for decades. Hirst just ran with an unoriginal idea in an original way. Which, pretty much, is what art always does.
From artfagcity:
There is, we recognize, a historical danger here. Someday, the record of this exhibition might be dug up by a young art historian, or perhaps a blogger like us, or perhaps some sort of future blogger who does things with brainwaves. They’ll see that there was a massive show spread across every location of the most successful gallery of the time, entirely comprised of one of the most successful artists of the time, and that it was supported by some of the most illustrious voices money could buy. So I’m going to lay this down, just to clarify, so that nobody from the future gets confused: we hate this shit. Everyone hates this shit. These spots reflect nothing about how we live, see, or think, they’re just some weird meme for the impossibly rich that nobody knows how to stop.
