Damien Hirst's Spot Paintings Invade Gagosian Gallery (PHOTOS)

Does anyone really care to see an entire exhibition consisting of small colored spots on a series of white canvases? Would you change your mind if they were by Damien Hirst?

Over at Art Fag City we read with glee Will Brand's enraged response to the exhibition, which is simply titled, "The Complete Spot Paintings: 1986 - 2011." Featuring over 300 paintings consisting of twenty-five years of work by the enfant terrible of the contemporary art world, this exhibition will take place in eleven far-flung locations worldwide, from New York, London, and Paris to L.A., Geneva and Hong Kong. It's an art world takeover by the richest for the richest, with 150 collectors lending their prized pieces to the pot. There's even an upcoming iPad app that will feature a number of the paintings from the exhibition, so the tech-savvy can yawn collectively over the tiny colored circles on a simple white background.

Brand writes, "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."

We know schadenfreude is bad for the complexion, but we can't help but want another outcome for the multimillionaire bad boy artist. David Hockney recently called out Hirst over the use of his assistants to create his art, which should be the beginning of a long conversation. When artists become Taylorist overlords, we know we've all gone too far in accepting the disturbing consumerist nature of the contemporary art world. Besides, we prefer Yayoi Kusama's frenzied take on dots over Hirst's any day.

Click through the images below to decide for yourself, and please let us know your thoughts in the comments section.

The exhibition runs from January 12 - March 10, 2012 at Gagosian Gallery locations worldwide.

Comments

[MAragon]

04:31 PM on 04/12/2012

Hirst is still giving art a bad name. In a weird way, he and Kinkade had a lot in common: both were masters of the self-promotion.

[Shesme]

02:51 AM on 03/03/2012

dang. them spots is painted crooked too. the assistants are too lazy to use stencils.

[Fonfax]

09:56 PM on 02/19/2012

21st century salon art.

[Bylow Selhai]

12:37 AM on 02/15/2012

The "art bubble" will soon burst...

[flaconoire]

09:27 AM on 01/23/2012

Boring art by a master at self promotion

[FancyAmerican]

02:09 AM on 01/11/2012

"I could have done that!"

But you didn't.

Anyway, I find the work rather boring, but everyone likes different things. Remember, art is subjective.

[Morchlen Simmons]

12:26 PM on 04/16/2012

Art is not only subjective. Without the objective standards that underlie the historian and the connoisseur's judgement it can be a scam. The subjectivity has to be informed.

[OceanEric]

11:21 AM on 01/10/2012

Another example of: "Some people have too much money."

[Kathleen Massara]

04:28 PM on 01/09/2012

How long do you think this phenomenon (art as currency) has been going on?

[Morchlen Simmons]

12:20 PM on 04/16/2012

Art has had monetary value in both the ancient world and in modern times, but the current self-celebration of art as first and foremost a commodity, a kind of very expensive and flippant joke about its own market value, probably dates from Warhol.

[Debbie Harris Kommalan]

11:28 AM on 01/09/2012

Rather boring. I suppose "in it's day" it was der letzte Schrei.

[holierthandow]

10:46 AM on 01/09/2012

Big Boy Trading Cards. Pick anything, a dried raisin for example, pin it to a tree stump, set a market value and sell it to those who look to you to establish market value. Chumps, rubes, or as they've become known in our era, investors. Damien Hirst is the world's highest earning living artist. He represents the money not the art.

[tapani]

10:33 AM on 01/09/2012

Nice colors, but thank you for the link to Yayoi Kusama pages in Australia.

[Ciaopiazza]

10:14 AM on 01/09/2012

Makes me sad. Why don't you do an article about an artist no one's heard of whose work is interesting and change things?

[artist-53]

06:42 AM on 01/09/2012

It doesn't take an Artist to produce dots.

It takes a very artistically stunted imagination to produce the redundancy that Hirst has produced.

And I only hope that in the future, Art will no longer be defined by quirky consumerism controlled by gallery owners

[grandma58]

09:10 PM on 01/09/2012

There are items in the art world making me wonder why my grandchildren aren't rich.
I don't think art is defined by quirky consumerism so much. Art is art and just cause someone is paid big bucks for it doesn't make it art.

[trp981]

04:01 AM on 01/09/2012

This is truly a remarkable phenomenon: artwork as a form of currency. The same way that worthless paper can perform the function of money backed by the power of the state, a set of dots on canvas can also become a reservoir of monetary value, a place where the super rich can park their money. It is a convenient mechanism that provides both economic value and social status. However, not the work of just any artist will do, he or she must have achieved a certain level of fame. It is irrelevant that the work itself have any intrinsic value, what is required is for the artist to have achieved a halo of significance sanctioned by a community of critics and patrons. Duchamp recognized the initial stages of the monetization of artwork and brilliantly - and sarcastically - marked it with his Fountain.

[wrbrand]

01:20 AM on 01/09/2012

Reconsidering now that I've seen "Moxisylyte".