Damien Hirst’s “The Complete Spot Paintings” is an archipelago of shows in all eleven spaces of Larry Gagosian’s gallery empire: three in New York; two in London; and one each in Paris, Geneva, Rome, Athens, Hong Kong, and Beverly Hills. Deliberate deadness distinguishes Hirst’s art, not only in the famous pickled shark but in everything he makes, including the three hundred and thirty-one paintings now globally on display: grid arrangements of colored disks, in household gloss paint, on white grounds, all but the earliest few of them executed by the artist’s employees. Their formulaic concept amounts to intellectual formaldehyde. But tastiness applies, too, in the pleasantly disorienting effects of colors that appear to be distributed at random: bright or muted and warm or cool, all ajumble. If there’s no harmony, there’s also no monotony. They range in size from tiny to immense, and in number of spots from one to more than twenty-five thousand. Nothing that Hirst does lacks an art-historical pedigree. He has recycled tropes from Marcel Duchamp, Surrealism, Francis Bacon, Minimalism, and numerous near-contemporaries. His immersed animal corpses stem directly from Jeff Koons’s basketball-flotation tanks. Hirst is originally unoriginal, to put it positively: a master of supererogation. His work comprehends all manner of things about previous art except, crucially, why it was created. It smacks less of museums than of art-school textbooks. What may pass for meaning in the spot paintings is the sum of their associations in the history of abstraction. The more you know of that, the cleverer the paintings might make you feel. Buying one, you can hang it on your wall like a framed diploma from Smartypants U. (via)