RANKING 115 SIMILAR PAINTINGS.

RANKING 115 SIMILAR PAINTINGS. Damien Hirst is exhibiting 115 of his “Spot Paintings” in Gagosian galleries in New York City. Worldwide, he is exhibiting 331 of the paintings; there are over 1500 of them. The rules for the spot paintings are that they consist of enamel dots on a white background arranged in a grid at intervals equal to the diameter of the dots. No color can be repeated. Apparently, the grids can be of different sizes. Here is a photo. You can find others by Googling “Hirst spot paintings”. The record price for one of them is 3.48 million dollars. Roberta Smith reviewed the New York Spot Paintings here for the New York Times and took on what I would have thought was an impossible task: comparing and ranking them. She finds stark differences among them concluding that: “they range from good to atrocious.” Some are “visually exhilarating”; others are “redundant and oppressive”. This article at ARTINFO has a slideshow of some of the paintings and other rankings, such as the gallery with most spots and the gallery with the least spots.