Seeing Damien Hirst’s Spots Before Their Eyes

Hundreds Travel the World on a “Challenge” to Visit 11 Gargosian Galleries

When the science fiction author Jules Verne wrote Around the World in Eighty Days, he could not have imagined its current version in the art world. This month, the international art dealer Larry Gargosian has persuaded people to journey the globe to gaze upon “Spot Paintings” by British super-artist Damien Hirst at all 11 Gargosian galleries.

            In the Jules Verne novel, the 80-day adventure began as a bet in a British club. Similarly, the “Spot Challenge” offers a prize—a spot print signed by Hirst—to anyone who visits every gallery on a self-funded world trip. The spot artworks are all composed of multicolored dots in grid-like formations on white fields.

            The betting began this month, and reportedly several hundreds of people—leaning toward young travelmeisters, art journalists, and wealthy hipsters—are taking planes, trains, and buses in an itinerary that stretches from New York to Hong Kong and London (a loop of about 20,000 miles). Some participants seek the Hirst print as a personal treasure. Others will try to cash it in on the art market.

            The hanging of spot paintings in all 11 Gargosian galleries is “structured as a global exhibition,” a spokeswoman said. “Damien and the gallery thought it would be extraordinary if someone made it to every location. He felt that whoever did should be rewarded with some artwork.” One wonders why anyone would want to go to every location to see similar spot paintings. But then, recall, in olden times, people walked hundreds of miles to see a boring shrine.

            As Britain’s wealthiest living artist, Hirst is a kind of rock star. Rock stars all have groupies, so the fact that people are taking the “challenge” seems harmless enough. As a conceptual artist, Hirst has big ideas, but then he pays workers and craftsmen to carry them out. The current exhibition, “The Complete Spot Paintings 1986–2011,” has been painted by hired help. The galleries are showing 331 spot paintings out of some 1,400 that Hirst staffers have produced.

            At first, Hirst was a rather humble art worker, studying art at Goldsmiths College in London, and helping fellow artists show their rather in-your-face art work at warehouse shows. By helping the others, Hirst rose as ringleader of “the Young British Artists,” a name given to them after the multimillionaire advertising executive, Charles Saatchi, promoted them like a new punk rock band. They held several controversial shows—titled “Sensation”—designed to offend and stir publicity.

            After that, anything that Hirst made was blue chip material for the art market. In the mid-1990s he was one of the fastest rising contemporary artists, sought by the Turner Prize in England and Venice Biennale in Italy.

            As a working class Brit, beloved for his foul mouth and carefree (former) doping and drinking, Hirst became famous for putting dissected animals in formaldehyde. His shark in a tank became a symbol of the new British art. When millions in sales rolled in, he poured millions into each new art project, always being newsworthy for the price tag, if not the artistic merit. Oligarch collectors, from Russia to China, lined up to obtain Hirst “originals.” To meet the demand, Hirst defaulted to production-line art, and thus his proliferation of spot paintings.

            Now that the “Spot Challenge” is on, it almost seems that the participants—who reportedly can make the world trip on a $2,500 economy air fare—are giving Gargosian and Hirst free publicity (as is this column). From the participant point of view, however, it must surely be a personal thrill ride, with a record to set, and not a few hardships to overcome.

            The first winner was 27-year-old Valentine Uhovski, who handily completed the 11-stop trip, passing through New York, Los Angeles, Hong Kong, Athens, Rome, Geneva, Paris, and London. It took him eight-days (not 80 days). From Russia, Uhovski moved to America and founded the Artruby website, which no doubt praises Hirst. The second to complete the trip was Jeff Chu, a journalist for Fast Company magazine.

            A young writer for Britian’s Art Newspaper, Cristina Ruiz, chronicled her low-budget progress across Europe in a blog, for which other young bloggers have cheered her on. Each participant must prove their 11 visits by a document stamped at each Gargosian Gallery, so Ruiz gingerly ticked off the first two in London.

            “Two stamps down, nine more to go!” she wrote January 12.

            Then she began her travails of travel on a shoe string. “I am boarding a train to Paris from St Pancras station,” she wrote later. “It’s not fun getting up at this ungodly hour but at €39 ($51), the 5:40 am train to Paris was the best deal I could find, so here I am.”

            And of course, Ruiz’s writer’s dilemma in dealing with the Hirst dots, like spots before her eyes, suddenly dawns upon her, sooner rather than later: “There’s no depth to the brushstrokes, no variation to the composition, just painting after painting of incessant glossy dots. . . . Which begs the question: what on earth am I going to blog about as I make my way around another TEN galleries full of spots?”

            As a talented young writer, and a dedicated pilgrim, Ruiz will have surely found something original to say. Almost certainly, it will be more original and interesting than the spot paintings themselves.