NYTimes crows: Hirst “has jumped the shark”
ABOVE: detail from Damien Hirst’s Hospital Corridor (2004), currently showing at the Chelsea Gagosian Gallery in New York
The New York Times is trying so, so hard to become again the definitive critical voice on art in America, a position it lost through laziness and complacency throughout the 80s and 90s and has only recently re-committed to winning back. The strategy, however, has often resorted to overbroad, sweeping declarations such as “Damien Hirst is so last year,” calculated to assert critical authority through sheer gall.
OK, so the sentence “Damien Hirst is so last year” doesn’t actually appear in this Times review of the Damien Hirst show, “The Elusive Truth,” currently on at the Chelsea tentacle of the Gagosian Gallery. But it does include this statement:
“…investors and glossy magazines keep Mr. Hirst’s business and celebrity booming. But being gifted and savvy, he might want to return to the drawing board. His act has jumped the shark.” [emphasis added]
Oh, a shark joke, we get it. That’s clever. And way to use that creaky 1998 jargon. We’ve questioned Hirst’s merit at ADD before, and hope not to have to discuss him for a while now, but this article reviews Damien Hirst and his patrons with more gusto than it reviews his art. It also essentially declares the Y.B.A. movement dead (perhaps), Hirst to be a third-rate Warhol derivative (been there, done that), and Chelsea art spectators to be shallow twerps (well…).
All may be true, and the job of the reviewer is to write what he thinks, which Michael Kimmelman has presumably done. But at the same time, it feels like the New York Times is desperately trying to wring cultural significance out of a rather small show by asserting that, during the show’s opening, “a moment had passed.”
It’s an entertaining read, either way, but in many ways, the review itself is a great example of “jumping the shark.”