What's with the spots?

Last night, swathed in layers of scarves and jumpers, I walked headfirst into the bone-chillingly windy western streets of Chelsea to seek out the Gagosian Gallery on West 24th (between 10th and 11th... so basically IN the river). Gagosian is currently exhibiting The Complete Spot Paintings, a collection of all of Hirst's completely dotty paintings, across its 11 galleries worldwide. Though I'm no art guru or afficionado, nor a Hirst devotee, I have of course a general social awareness of him and how he fits into pop-cultural discussions and attitudes. The formaldehyde shark and the diamond encrusted skulls and the debate that surrounds them sits somewhere on the periphery of my consciousness, along with Snooki and the Ryan Gosling meme and The Wire and Newt Gingrich. As in, I get that these are all things, but that's about the extent of it. 

Anyway, going to the exhibition of Hirst's spot paintings caused a kind of chain reaction where all those periphery-bound thoughts about his work, whether it is art, what is its worth etc. came stumbling to the forefront of my brain. I tossed through them while I stood in the cavernous hall, my brain (seriously unschooled, in matter of art that is) holding the following dialogue: "wow, they certainly make an impression. Isn't that what art is supposed to do? They're deceptively simple pieces, do you think he used a computer or some sort of automated device to draw those circles? Is that what art is really about? Well, isn't he challenging our preconceptions of beauty and aesthetics? This kind of provokes a feeling of nothingness, isn't that kind of the antithesis of what art is meant to do - fulfill you, move you? I don't know, is that what art is really about? Or is it about challenging you, making you uncomfortable? But this doesn't even make me uncomfortable, it just makes my eyes sting because the whiteness is so white that it makes the coloured spots kind of dance around. You know what would be cool, a spotty key ring. Where is the gift shop?"

In the end, I settled on an opinion on the works, which was so unarticulate that I would have never dreamed of expressing it here, until I stumbled across this excerpt of a review in The New Yorker, which says it better than I could have ever hoped to say it: 

“Deliberate deadness distinguishes Hirst’s art, not only in the famous pickled shark but in everything he makes, including the paintings now globally on display: grid arrangements of colored disks, in household gloss paint, on white grounds. Their formulaic concept amounts to intellectual formaldehyde. I can enjoy looking at one for a while, but to like them would entail identifying with the artist’s cynicism, as herds of collectors, worldwide, evidently do. Hirst will go down in history as a peculiarly cold-blooded pet of millennial excess wealth. That’s not Old Master status, but it’s immortality of a sort.”

I especially liked that the snipped is entitled, "Jumping the Shark", invoking another peripheral cultural reference out there in my subconscious.