greg.org

From the Times:

But, at first, the thought of painting in this Photo Realist manner intimidated him. When he began in earnest about three and a half years ago, he realized why.
“I started out airbrushing,” he said. “But the images looked flat, dead. For two years I didn’t think it was going to work.” Finally, he said, he disciplined himself to represent each image faithfully by hand.
Still, he doesn’t consider himself a serious painter. “I would feel uncomfortable putting myself in a category with other painters like Goya or Bacon,” he said. “I’m more interested in the images than the painting.”

From Linda Yablonsky on Artforum.com:

Though many guests made the connection, Hirst may have thought he was avoiding comparisons to Jeff Koons by ordering hired hands to paint each piece in this chilling body of work rather badly. (One assistant was reportedly fired for painting too well.)

But I hope he didn’t think he was avoiding comparisons to another Damien who makes paintings “in photo-realist style from pictures in magazines and print ads”: Damien Loeb.
But my favorite quote from Yablonsky captures a whole swath of the art world’s, “I’m here, so it must be important” sense of audacious self-consciousness, without a hint of self-awareness:

At these prices [up to $2mm] it’s difficult to understand how paintings that are not going to get any better with time can continue to acquire value. Though truth be elusive, let’s just say that that is exactly Hirst’s point: to empty art of meaning. In a market where money is so disposable, how can art transcend mere currency to become more than just a brand? If this is indeed Hirst’s message, then he has issued a galling challenge to every other living artist. It will be interesting to see who takes it up.

Or not. Because it’s not like anyone’s ever paid more than $2 million for a painting before, or even for a Hirst.
As some smart aleck said in the NY Times, “Just because you’ve spent a lot of time and money on something doesn’t mean it’s very good.”
Taste for the Macabre but No Pickled Sharks [nyt]
High and Dry, Linda Yablonsky [artforum.com]

AND at The National Gallery? I’d love to hear how it’s installed in Ando’s (probably) more sympathetic building.
Huh. They call The Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth “The Modern”.

The other night Thomas Demand offhandedly described some of the insane details of the production of Clearing, the massive photograph of a forest which is now built into The Modern at MoMA. The photograph was laminated onto two sheets of architectural safety glass that were so large, they had to use satellite-curing ovens at ESA, the European Space Agency–at night–to fabricate it. When the request for the work, Thomas said, “no one quite knew what they were getting.”
[On an irrelevant note, the lifesize set for Clearing happened to be in Demand’s studio during a MoMA Jr Associates visit I set up. It was so stunning, the trustees quickly added the studio to their Berlin itinerary, and curator Kynaston McShine suggested the Modern acquire the work. And I still can’t get a reservation.]
I mention this–obviously I mention the studio story for self-aggrandizement, but remember the tagline of this site, yo–because not quite knowing what you’re getting seems like one of the underlying currents of Demand’s work.
Walking through the show, I tried to recall the portentous actual setting that was obscured behind each photograph’s generic title: Kitchen was Saddam’s, Archive was Riefenstahl’s, etc., but I kept remembering them wrong, which made me load all kinds of historical baggage onto each image; turns out only some of the bags actually matched. Barn was Pollock’s, not Kaczynski’s; the cluttered desk was L. Ron Hubbard’s, not Bill Gates’. The Bauhaus-style stairway was from Demand’s middle school, but it turns out even he remembered it wrong.

Thomas Demand opens today at MoMA [moma.org]
Michael Kimmelman calls it “hypnotic” [nyt]
No one goes to The Modern; it’s too crowded