Damien Hirst, it turns out, is a savagely conservative critic of the art of our time. He's leading the backlash – against himself. No one has done more to popularise the idea that art as concept beats art as craft. No one has more spectacularly – or lucratively – shown that art can be a team-built, hands-off, readymade phenomenon. A whole generation has taken Hirst's licence to produce art that doesn't so much reject as coldly ignore traditions of painting, drawing and sculpture. And now Hirst is basically saying it was all nonsense. He didn't mean it. He wanted to be a great painter all along. But, as any visitor to his show at the Wallace Collection can see, he's not.
It is shocking to see an artist so successful in arguing that art owes nothing to its past, sacrifice himself to that past. Hirst's exhibition is a stupefying admission of defeat, a self-obliterating homage, that reveals the most successful artist of our time to be a tiny talent, with less to offer than even the most obscure Victorian painter in the Wallace Collection, let alone its Fragonards and Rembrandts. He reveals this because he chooses to meet them on their own terms, as a painter.
There is a genre of intervention by contemporary artists in museums that by now has become a cliche. Video installations, photography and conceptual works get placed in museums, modern works in a modern language. By contrast, Hirst has said: I want to be compared directly with the old masters, on their own turf, in their own visual language. In his eyes, it would seem that all the readymades, all the vitrines – all the ideas that have made him rich – are not real art at all. They are substitutes for the art he wishes he could make. The one truly great art, in his eyes, is the high western tradition of oil painting.
He can't do that at all; can't paint his way out of a paper bag. But don't kid yourselves. It is not just Hirst who is implicated in this exposure. It is an entire idea of art that triumphed in the 1990s and still dominates our culture – an entire age of the readymade stands accused by its own creator of being a charade. No critic has even come close to the total dismissal of 21st-century art implied by Hirst's turnabout. This call to order leaves me dumbfounded.
