Damien Hirst does not consider himself a serious gambler. He likes to play roulette “because it’s easy.” And he tells a story about learning the “fail-safe rules for blackjack” from his London gallerist Jay Jopling, only to lose all of his money at the table within two hours.

But when it comes to the art world, Hirst is known for a showy sort of risk-taking, even if at 46 his prime rock-star-style binge partying days are largely behind him. His most famous artworks hinge on a sort of brinkmanship ― a shark in formaldehyde anyone?

And he plays the art market as successfully as anyone, whether by creating a highly photogenic diamond-encrusted skull and pricing it at nearly $100 million or by bypassing his galleries to sell hundreds of artworks at Sotheby’s London for a staggering $200 million in September 2008, just as the financial markets plunged to record lows.

Now, for his latest art-market venture, the British artist has teamed with his longtime U.S. dealer Larry Gagosian to supply all 11 Gagosian galleries worldwide with shows of his well-known “Spot” paintings, which feature grids of dots painted in different colors. All exhibitions, including Beverly Hills, New York, London and Hong Kong, will take place simultaneously Jan. 12 to Feb. 18. (Hirst plans to attend the New York opening.)

He expects to show about 300 paintings made from 1986 to today. More than half will be loans from private collectors and museums; the rest is for sale. While individual prices have not been disclosed, conservative estimates based on past sales of spot paintings could make the material worth at least $100 million ― unless the volume scares off buyers.

Instead of talking about pricing for the show, Hirst spoke about the mega-exhibition as an argument for the complexity of the spot paintings, which have been dismissed by some art critics like Robert Hughes as “silly” abstractions.

The paintings on their own “look sort of happy ― like Skittles or kids’ sweets,” Hirst said during an interview in L.A., where he stopped en route to Las Vegas with musician friend Antony Genn. “But when you see them together you get kind of lost in them. There’s an underlying anxiousness.”

Still, exhibiting 300 spot paintings at one time is exactly the kind of egomaniacal gesture that people love to hate. It fits a pattern that once prompted art critic Jerry Saltz to call Hirst “a symptom of the hype, the hubris and the money that have swamped the art scene lately.”

Others have suggested that the only real content, the only meaningful theme, of his artwork over the years has been money or ambition itself.

Hirst shrugged. “I’m not afraid to take risks,” he said. “I try things that on the surface shouldn’t work, and people resent that. I could have easily done the (2008) auction at Sotheby’s with 12 works, but I did it with three catalogs and 200 works, and it was over-the-top and in-your-face and then it pays off and people hate that, in England especially.”

Hirst dismissed as “gibberish” allegations that his dealers helped to prop up his prices by purchasing some of these works and pitching in to buy his diamond-studded skull. But the perception that he is too big to fail surely fuels any resentment.

Then there’s the fact, often irksome for those not sold on conceptual art, that he makes little of this work himself. He began his spot paintings in the mid ’80s, inspired, he said, by the “sight of colored balls on a snooker (pool) table.”

He did some of his earliest spot paintings in 1988 directly on the walls of the groundbreaking “Freeze” exhibition, which he helped to organize while still a student at Goldsmiths, before hitting on the current formula. The idea is simple: rows of different colored spots, no color repeated on a single canvas, in which the diameter of the spot would equal the gap between them. He took his titles for the series from the seemingly endless supply of pharmaceutical names found in the Physicians’ Desk Reference.

But after completing five paintings himself, he turned the job over to others. “As soon as I sold one, I got assistants to do them,” he said, suggesting it fit not just his lifestyle but also the notion of the work looking like it’s made by assembly line.

The series is “a battle between the machine made and man-made,” he said. “From a distance they look machine made, and then on closer inspection you can see traces of the human hand, pencil lines and (compass) holes.”

At present, he says he has already made about 1,400 spot paintings, to be published in a full catalogue raisonne at the time of his gallery shows.

By Jori Finkel

(Los Angeles Times)
(MCT Information Services)