Damien Hirst in Chelsea

Damien Hirst Damien Hirst has left the building. His new exhibition at Larry Gagosian's 27,000 square foot gallery is big, really, really big. Larger in scale, sheer weight, financing and hype than any other gallery exhibition in recent memory, Hirst has grown his already monstrous conceit to unheralded, mammoth proportions. Serving notice on other purveyors of artistic bulk like Richard Serra and Jeff Koons, Hirst has found in Gagosian's cavernous, football-field sized space his perfect stage. The Richard Gluckman-designed gallery, the biggest thing of its kind in power-loving Chelsea, and Hirst's conceptual-minded bulwarks against considered cogitation pair like few other mythically overdimensioned bookends: think of the Empire State and King Kong, the Atlantic Ocean and the Titanic, Gargantua and Pantagruel. Damien Hirst, HYMN, 1999

Long-windedly titled "Theories, Models, Methods, Approaches, Assumptions, Results, and Findings," Hirst's exhibition redefines, in the bullying words of Republican senatorial hopeful Rick Lazio, the word chutzpah. With both eyes peeled toward a brand of success at odds with the more memorable, but human-scaled accomplishments of folks like Rembrandt, Picasso and Francis Bacon (all of whom Hirst, amazingly, has declared admiration for), the one-time YBA wunderkind now models himself after an entirely different type of artist, namely the financial kind. Charles Saatchi, Michael Eisner, Barry Diller and Rupert Murdoch are now his peers, affirms the former art punk via his recent power-grabbing exhibition. Masters of the Universe, the speculative, buccaneering, high-stakes example of these 21st century robber barons has transformed Damien Hirst, once mere successful artistic tyro, into a fledgling, worldwide entertainment impresario: William Randolph Hirst. To walk into Larry Gagosian's enormous hangar-of-an-exhibition-space is to be invisibly fitted with a set of X-ray specs: the better to see the awesome, Florentine power moves behind the predictably thin screen of Hirst's work. Strewn about in five separate galleries each of which is the envy of Chelsea's surrounding art emporiums are 10 of Hirst's characteristic steel-and-glass vitrines; two human skeletons with bouncing ping-pong balls for eyes; four stainless-steel cabinets filled with pills, medical equipment or animal bones; a complement of dull, serial spot paintings; yet another piece that includes a floating beach ball; and a single 20-foot-high, painted bronze replica of a toy anatomical model, a sort of Trojan Horse packing within its solid, 7-ton breast the giant, jazzy-colored, high-priced vacuity that is Hirst's perfectly foundried analogue to Donald Trump's eponymous tower.

To say that each of Damien Hirst's high-priced works trumpet the same bellowing corporatist note is at once to be right and yet miss the point entirely. Never exactly a profound artist, Hirst's real genius always lay solidly at the business end of the artist/entrepreneur spectrum. Arguably the man most responsible for this decade's Young British Art phenomenon, Hirst organized, prodded, cajoled, provoked and shocked artists, curators, collectors, the press and finally the entire population of frumpy Britain into handing him and some of his closest Goldsmiths College art pals the keys to their easily outraged but undivided attention. As the scene turned global at mid-decade, Hirst laid off to Charles Saatchi and "Sensation" the mantle of keeper of the YBA flame. Stepping into artistic semiretirement by the age of 30 (eat your heart out Julian Schnabel), Hirst bought an expensive farm in England's posh south, made a music video for the pop band Blur, designed a few record covers, and built his own pretentious restaurant, called Pharmacy, a sort of All Star Cafe for London tourists, art groupies and lovers of watery drinks from the world over.

"I just wanted to find out where the boundaries were," Hirst coyly confessed to an unresponsive art journalist. "So far I've found there aren't any. I wanted to be stopped but nobody stopped me." A showman extraordinaire, Damien Hirst has time and again confused promotion with art-making, the exploitation of conceptual strategies with the fashioning of conceptual content. Never confused as fully or on such a scale as in this current exhibition, Hirst's incessantly hullabalooed, much-in-demand work has never before come so close to British critic Julian Stallabrass' problematic definition of Brit art, "High Art Lite": "an art that looks like but is not quite art, that acts as a substitute for art."

Allowing for the present philosophical conundrum that makes it impossible to distinguish, on the basis of artistic merit, Vermeers from rotting piles of meat, it can safely be said that, among other things, Damien Hirst's newest works fail miserably at evoking anything besides the brimming largesse that purchased their costly, gleaming parts. Unsurprisingly, a simple listing of materials goes a long way to describing the major pieces in the exhibition. One work, Love Lost (Large River Fish), according to the gallery literature consists of a "Vitrine tank and filtration unit, 1 couch, 1 trolley, 1 chair, surgical instruments, 1 computer, fish." Throw in the obvious, unnamed element, water, and you've got a perfect picture of Hirst's work, gimmicky and radical as the beefsteak Salvador Dali's will insists be placed atop a painting in his namesake museum in Figueres, Spain.

Monuments to massively egotistical, unreflective entertainment, other works in the exhibition, such as Concentrating on a Self Portrait as a Pharmacist?its stagy elements are "Vitrine, self-portrait of Damien, artist's easel, table, chair, bedside locker, tubes of paint, brushes, ashtray, cup, large mirror, rags, doctor's coat, easel"?provide faux surprises in the form of knowing winks from the artist's chummy genius: in this case, the lipstick traces on a mirror that read "I love you." The exhibition's title piece, a couple of Hirst's signature, minimalist-inspired vitrines housing two blowers and a mess of ping-pong balls, pack anything but a revelation inside the sculpture's glass and metal. A likeness of a speeded-up lottery bin, Theories, Models, Methods, Approaches, Assumptions, Results, and Findings marks the closest Hirst comes to finding actual subject matter for his witless art objects. His prize idea?life is a crapshoot?is a booby prize, a cliche so big it could easily fit inside the capacious frame of a Puppy sculpture.

Despite what the artist and slavish critics will tell you, Damien Hirst's art is not and has never been about "the big themes, Birth, Life, Death and Love," but about vastly smaller, fleeting, popular notions of success and entertainment value. After making art in England nearly as famous as national pastimes "the telly" and "the footie," Hirst, like scores of other British immigrants, now covets big-time American-style fame. Long suffering from what theater critic Kenneth Tynan called a "superiority complex," Hirst has upped the ante on his previous use of entertainment razzmatazz, raising it to gloriously excessive American levels. Invoking a long list of kamikaze-style self-advertisers from Liberace to Ted Turner, Damien Hirst has come in search of our love, our applause, but mostly our unreserved awe. Art's answer to Donald Trump, he'll just keep on building monuments until we all sit up and take notice.

"Damien Hirst: Theories, Models, Methods, Approaches, Assumptions, Results, and Findings," through Dec. 16, Gagosian Gallery, 555 W. 24th St. (betw. 10th & 11th Aves.), 741-1111.