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.”
