There is an unutterable sadness to seeing Damien Hirst’s new paintings at Frieze. These big pictures of gardens, their blurry photorealism besmirched with Pollockesque drips in a desperate attempt to bring such duds to life, are the star turn at Gagosian, one of the mightiest of the art dealers whose chic stands fill the vast white tent of the art fair. But no one looks fooled. Few are giving Hirst’s paintings a second look at the VIP view, which is filled with moneyed collectors, articulate salespeople, my daughter and me.
I try to explain to her how exciting and dangerous Hirst once was, when he was young, when he got someone to kill a tiger shark so he could put it in an art gallery. “He had the shark killed?” “Well, you don’t just find a tiger shark on a beach. It was a different time.”
Hirst in the early 1990s made art seem unsafe, outrageous, like something that mattered in the world. Now he is painting gardens – which would be wonderful if he did it well. Unfortunately, he is no David Hockney. He still shows absolutely no talent for painting the real world. It is 14 years since Hirst first exhibited “proper” paintings by his own hand. He has learned nothing about the craft since. He is still bad, flat and unimaginative, yet he somehow gets a major display at the heart of an art fair that supposedly defines the new.
The misery of The Secret Gardens, as Hirst calls his snores, is not just that they are confirmation of his decline. It is also the fact these works are far from the dullest things here. Even in his dotage, Hirst has a bad-taste boldness that reminds you, vaguely, of what it’s like to see unexpected, exhilarating contemporary art. But there is precious little of that here.
Hirst didn’t become the extremely rich man he is by not having an eye for the market. And he has noticed the market wants paintings. Art collectors still buy video, photography and conceptual art – and, once, they even bought sharks. But oily colours on canvas have a pedigree, an aura of value, that has always made painting the blue chip definition of collectible art. At Frieze this year, there are so many paintings – from abstract monochromes to saucy murals – that when you do come across something that’s not another painting, you fixate on it. Gillian Wearing has made a giant charm bracelet with a life mask of her face and replicas of body parts all slung together on a thick chain: a sculpture of true unease. Wearing flirts with the surreal, yet her blankly accurate rendition of her face makes it all too real. Between the kitchen sink and the nightmare comes the uncanny.
It is largely Wearing’s generation of Young British Artists who shocked their way to fame three decades ago that stand out like treasures on a charm bracelet in this drab and pedestrian 20th edition of a once-rollicking art fair. You find yourself stopping by drawings by Glenn Brown that knottily riff on Rubens and Leonardo da Vinci. A painting by Gary Hume of huge pink flowers emerging like poisonous poems out of greenery has all the mystery that Hirst’s garden paintings lack. Yet once these artists were young rebels. Now they look like serious, thoughtful creators in a gathering full of fly-by-night, cynical attempts to please and get bought.
Wearing, Brown and Hume all made their bones in an era when contemporary art fought for attention and had to insist it mattered – when in Britain, at least, it seemed cutting edge to like it at all. Nowadays, barely anyone is brave enough to admit they don’t. Frieze in its two decades has helped to normalise the new. And domesticate it. And thus kill it.
Matthew Slotover and Amanda Sharp, who founded this art fair in 2003, no longer run it. Today, they create restaurants while Frieze is majority-owned by US “talent agency and holding company” Endeavor, with Simon Fox, a former media executive, as its CEO. So what’s cool about it?
Nothing that I can see, as dealers talk up their goods to one percenters at every booth. Why do people think that shoplike spaces filled with selections of saleable stuff make an ideal venue to appreciate the power of art? This week, just a few miles away, El Anatsui opened a superb installation in the Tate Turbine Hall, proving once more that great contemporary art thrives on huge post-industrial spaces. You couldn’t fit that in a booth. Instead, you get fragments of interest: a small yellow wooden foot hewn by Georg Baselitz; a tiny, hyperreal figure by Tomoaki Suzuki; a papier-mache creation by Monster Chetwynd based on the Victorian asylum artist Richard Dadd’s painting The Fairy Feller’s Master Stroke.
As for the legions of paintings, they veer between the bland and bizarre. Chetwynd’s neo-Victorian work belongs to a veritable micro-fashion for costume dramas. A huge realistic landscape painting by Paulina Olowska looks as if it could have been painted a century ago. Maybe Olowska is hoping to get bought by Tate Britain and shown as a rediscovered Suffragette artist – since her picture stars a young woman dressed like a Virginia Woolf character striding through the fields. Back to the future, or a cosy neo-pastoral idyll? Constantin Nitsche’s painting La Visite III also looks like a classy book cover – or a storyboard for a Merchant Ivory film.
All of which makes such paintings lovely to hang on your wall, no? Only if you have a very high boredom threshold. They are at best slightly distracting for a moment. There is no sign here of artistic revolution or challenge. The great upheavals of modern art don’t just seem to have come to an end at Frieze. It’s as if they never happened. Whatever you think of Picasso’s personal life, he did shake the foundations of western culture. Whereas art now, on this evidence, exists to mildly entertain in a tasteful, reaffirming, bland way.
Frieze has become a corporate snooze. Have the galleries been actively encouraged by its big-business owners to Disneyfy themselves? Or is that just the way art is now? The neo-Victorian craze is very apposite. The crowds admiring these timid artistic efforts may not wear top hats and crinolines, yet we could just well be at the Royal Academy in 1850 hailing the latest efforts of Mr Landseer.
Perhaps I should take it all back about Hirst. Maybe he has a brutally accurate eye for the times. The avant garde is dead. The function of art now is to avoid frightening or shocking or, God forbid, exciting anyone. The deathliness of Hirst’s garden paintings conveys the dire truth about Frieze. It is a graveyard of creativity, not a blooming garden. The excitement it once created seemed to confirm an essay by the late American critic Dave Hickey praising “the big, beautiful art market”. The aura of this art fair is based on the idea that Hickey was right and money frees creativity.
But Hickey himself became disillusioned by the hypercommercialisation of art. And now, with the London art world stripped of the income stream from Russian oligarchs, Frieze looks about as creative as a shopping mall.
Frieze London and Frieze Masters are at Regent’s Park, London, until 15 October.
