Damien Hirst has picked up a paintbrush, and the results are not pretty. I mean that literally. What he's chosen to paint are ashtrays, gouts of blood, spinal cords and skulls, endless rows of skulls.
The critical reaction to this first foray into painting by the most successful British artist of his age is not pretty either: Hirst's three London shows (two at the White Cube, one at the venerable Wallace Collection) have been slated as "dreadful," "deadly dull" and "amateurish." Finally, after years of becoming exceedingly rich through his sculptures and conceptual art (the floating shark, the pharmacy/restaurant) he's working in the medium of the masters, and, crucially, on his own. The artist pups in his workshop who actually created the spin paintings and all the other hot-selling Hirsts have been banished.
Now, it's just him and his canvases in the glare of the spotlight, a brave if rash decision. The resulting storm - everyone wants to see, and sneer at, these paintings - is a few drops of St. Sebastian (those critical arrows must hurt) and a whole torrent of schadenfreude . The artist friend who accompanied me to the exhibit at the Wallace Collection stood in front of one canvas, with its wobbly skull and uncertain indigo background, and sputtered, "He can't even paint dots."
There appears to be some residual teeth-gnashing among artists over the fact that an auction of Hirst's work commanded $211-million last year - the same week that Lehman Brothers met its earthly end. People are only too happy to see the prince of self-belief tumble from his pedestal, and in these shows - especially the one at the Wallace - Hirst seems to be courting a smacking. How wise was it to place his paintings around the corner from Rubens and Rembrandt, the artistic equivalent of going to a party and wedging yourself between Angelina Jolie and Catherine Deneuve for the entire evening?
What I really can't understand is Hirst's continuing fascination with skulls. If nothing else, he's a fountain of invention, and his best works have been conceptual. So why is he trading in such hackneyed imagery? The skull is dead. It's over. You can find skulls on the clothing in Wal-Mart, and if that's not the graveyard of the outré I'm not sure what is. When four-year-olds wear T-shirts imprinted with "memento mori" and you can buy grandma a Keith Richards death's-head ring as a Christmas gift, it's really time to look elsewhere for your shocking iconography.
It was not always thus, of course. The skull has been a central part of religious imagery in Western art for almost 1,000 years. It was meant as a reminder that earthly vanity is fleeting, and riches transitory. Death is the great leveller. Maggots feast equally happily on princes and paupers. Just as important, it was meant as kind of a spiritual cattle prod, a way of telling Christians that there was still time to repent and get back on the road of piety, before the end arrived and you were sent to chew your nails and read old copies of Turnip Growers' Monthly in purgatory.
Now the afterlife's not a preoccupation for most of us, and a skull's just a funky decoration for the Christmas tree. Medieval peasants might have quailed at the sight of a human skull ("Wow, Eldric, that's what you look like under your leathery skin!"), but now we go to art exhibits where flayed human corpses are arrayed for our delight; diseased lung tissue stares up from our cigarette packages. The human body's mystery is lost forever.
Which brings me to an absolutely extraordinary new show at the National Gallery in London called The Sacred Made Real. It's Spanish painting and sculpture from the time of the Counter-Reformation, when the authorities decided that religious art had become too soft and pretty, and should induce terror and awe instead. ("You know Diego, I was coveting your ass and your wife, but then I saw this decapitated head of John the Baptist and thought I'd just admire them instead.")
There are skulls everywhere, including one in the hand of St. Francis Borgia, painted by Alonso Cano in 1624. St. Francis abandoned his aristocratic, plush existence for a life of devotion after accidentally seeing the worm-ravaged face of his patron, Isabella of Portugal, in her casket. (That's the church's story anyway, and they're sticking to it.) The skull in his hand wears a crown, but it's brown and gruesome, not the glamorous white totem that Hirst likes to paint.
At the opening of his White Cube show, Hirst said that "the paintings are about my mortality, whereas all the other stuff is about my immortality." The other stuff included a famous bit of Hirstian drollery that went on display two years ago, a skull encrusted with 8,600 diamonds and entitled For the Love of God . It was eventually sold for $100-million (reportedly to Hirst, his gallery and other investors), but while it was on display, thousands of people lined up to see it, the way they used to line up to see Victorian anatomical waxworks. ("By George, Horace, the intricate mysteries of the fallopian tube!")
The current show at the Wallace Collection is also a crowd-puller, a boon for a museum that's often sadly overlooked. Apparently the entire lot of canvases has sold. Perhaps somewhere deep in the skulls of the people looking at them, a vestigial thought stirs. We'll all be dust, one day.