What’s Happening To Hirst?

Damien Hirst has moved on from the days when he exhibited dead sharks and giant ashtrays, but has he really advanced his thinking at all? A new exhibit of Hirst’s photorealist paintings seem like just so much rehashed rebellion, says Michael Kimmelman, “blithely lacking finesse, [ignoring] photorealism’s first goals and [aspiring] only to be passingly ghoulish. And absent invention, they hang there like corpses… The era of the giant strutting ego as the amusing subject of art at this moment seems wincingly passé, supplanted by all those insouciant 20-somethings proffering their monkish, shuffling sort of virtuosity.”