Thursday, January 19, 2012

Damien Hirst Does Spots


     A lot , correction, an awful lot has been said about Damien Hirst's Global Exhibition of Spot Paintings which made me decide to refrain from commenting. It seemed like one more review and we'd all blow up from information/opinion overload.

Fortunately for mankind, here is the man himself, sanely explaining what, hows come and why. Very nice.


Damien Hirst: On the Spotfrom Matt Black on Nowness.com.
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- If you're seeing a white screen where the vidoe should be, just click on the first link (Damien Hirst . . ) to access the video.

AND, you'll find an eighteen-plus, minute video of an interview with Charlie Rose HERE.

     By now, you're quite aware that this Blog is about pointillism and paintings with dots. To my knowledge, Hirst is the only artist who calls his marks, spots. In my opinion spots are bigger than dots, so the thought occurred that maybe we should have a new category called Spot Paintings into which I would place artists who make larger dots - which qualify as spots.  For example: Thomas Downing.

What are you thoughts ?


Video from NOWNESS.com.


2 comments:

REVAD david riley said...

The main problem I foresee is deciding when a dot is no longer a dot and has indeed become a spot. Although it probably doesn't matter all that much which pigeon hole a work ends up in. At least with Hurst you have the artist himself to thank for the choice.

I always enjoy listening to Hurst talking about his work. Indeed I think it (his narration) is an essential part of his work.

Thanks for posting the video.

Adeaner said...

You're welcome.

The idea behind having yet another category is just one more facet in the sorting and description process to make it easier for readers to find the artists (and their oeuvres) that they're interested in. . . . .
And yes, sometimes it'll be just as tricky as deciding what is pointillism and what is dottillism.
For me, pointillism is about using dots to make an representational image or abstraction, where as dottillism is all about the dots, themselves. Example - I would classify Hirst's spots as dottillism.