Damien Hirst And The Art Of Trying Too Hard

Damien Hirst’s new show at White Cube took eight years to assemble. “The idea of transition and transformation is everywhere at White Cube: mounds of dead flies turned into crunchy, black, monochrome canvases; cows’ heads as apostles and as Adam and Eve; laboratory supplies and hardware store axes and mallets in reliquaries of martyred saints; animal blood for human blood.” It all has the smell of trying too hard.