A lot of art is stupid. A lot of art is lazy. A lot is arrogant, a lot is crap. But very, very little art manages to be all of those things at once. Then in swans Damien Hirst and his 10,000 shitty dot paintings and, hey presto, he’s done it: stupid, lazy, arrogant, crap art.
He’s made 10,000 little primary-coloured dot paintings, and 10,000 corresponding NFTs. Collectors had the option of keeping the NFT and destroying the physical artwork, or vice versa. If they chose NFT, their £20,000 painting is going to be torched, live in the gallery, during the run of this exhibition.
And here they are, strung up in rows. I’ll give him this much, they do look impressive all hung together in endless columns, the colourful originals next to grey facsimiles. But it also feels like walking through the fanciest ever Paperchase, browsing the world’s most expensive wrapping paper.
Upstairs, you find more dot paintings, placed around the ‘furnaces’ in which the works will be burned over the course of the exhibition. They’re essentially fancy fireplaces, which is useful because it helps you imagine what one of these abysmal paintings would look like in the living room of someone tasteless enough to buy one.
In the back room, there are video interviews with collectors talking about how NFTs are great investments. The whole show is Twitter crypto bros made real and it’s gross.
But look, forget about the fact that we’re in a cost-of-living crisis and people can’t afford to heat their homes while Damien Hirst physically burns money. What makes this show so awful isn’t just that it’s so out of touch with reality, or that these are dull, unoriginal, tedious paintings, it’s that Hirst thinks he’s being so wild and iconoclastic by turning them into NFTs and burning the rest.
He reckons he’s kicking against the system because it’s so gauche, taboo and uncouth to make art about money. ‘Artists shouldn’t go to money,’ he says in a video interview here. But in blurring the line between currency and art about currency, he’s just made some currency. This isn’t art about money, it literally is money: these are genuine, real, actual tradable commodities. It’s not art about greed, it is greed. The fact that he thinks it’s anything else is what makes it so stupid.
The only reprieve here is that almost half the works are getting set on fire. It would only be improved if he burned the rest while he was at it.