Skullduggery in London

LONDON—There was skullduggery afoot at the White Cube gallery last weekend, as Damien Hirst’s world-famous jewel-encrusted skull attracted a preview line of 200. “For the Love of God,” his first solo exhibition at the gallery since 2003, also included new shark and sheep pieces (Hirst is nothing if not consistent), as well as some gorily detailed photorealism works depicting his partner Maia’s caesarian section. But the skull was the main event.

By now the whole world knows that this life-size platinum skull is set with 8,061 diamonds worth £20 million, including a 55-carat, flawless pale pink stone from Bond Street jewelers Bentley & Skinner. The diamonds are real, and so are the “lightly cleaned” teeth with which the skull has also been set and which imbue it with a sinister reality.

According to the artist, the skull has already been sold for its asking price of £50 million, prompting one reviewer to say that Hirst has invented a new art genre—after Arte Povera, now comes Arte Ricca.

Is the skull Hirst’s comment on the boiling, Big Buck contemporary art scene that he’s done such a great deal to promote? Or is it just another chapter in his lengthy engagement with issues of mortality? Who knows? I left the show with another unanswered question: What on earth is Hirst going to do next? His moment of “skull”-duggery will surely be hard to follow. Not since Salvadore Dali’s pulsating, ruby-and-diamond heart stunned me decades ago have I seen anything remotely as powerful. At least, as a jewel, that is. Whether it is powerful as a work of art is another matter.

The show remains on view through July 7.

---------------

Photo London

Elsewhere, Photo London opened its doors in the former Old Billingsgate fish market during the last weekend in May. This fair has been revamped this year to focus primarily on contemporary photography (l970 and later), with the vintage photography section now going to Paris Photo in October.

Recent photography is such a vibrant and interesting area to collect that the lack of new and challenging young work at the fair was a real disappointment. It would be far better to catch “CROP,” the post-graduate show at Central St. Martin’s, which starts June l6.

But Photo London did have plenty of old favorites on show. At Flowers East (London), there was a suite of magnificent works by Robert Polidori that were unusually grand for the artist; they looked like they had been taken at Versailles. At Silverstein Photography (New York), Joel-Peter Witkin’s Kertesz in Edo (2005) was interesting, as were a series of film stills by David Lynch at the Agnes B. gallery.

At M+B (Los Angeles), I finally found something new—a series of gelatin-silver print landscapes by Rocky Schenck. Lovely and haunting, they depicted forgotten highways and abandoned ponds, and reminded me of charcoal drawings by Caspar David Friedrich, as well as the work of Hiroshi Sugimoto.

Also noteworthy were John Stezaker’s spliced, inverted, or manipulated images of people taken from books, magazines, postcards, and encyclopedias, on view at The Approach booth (London). They had a sinister quality and were curiously reminiscent of surrealist Angus McBean’s photos.

Some of the most interesting contemporary work in the show was at Hamiltons (London), where Guido Mocafico’s wonderfully color-saturated evocations of l7th-century Dutch still-lifes attracted a lot of dealer attention. And deservedly so: they were sophisticated and very beautiful.

But for my money, Edward Burtynsky’s extraordinary images at Flowers East ranked as Best in Show. His large-scale photographs depict the wasteland we are turning our world into. Here are the manufactured landscapes—quarries, recycling yards, factories, mines, and dams—that serve as chilling indictments of the way we treat nature.

The award-winning documentary Manufactured Landscapes—made by director Jennifer Baichwal—traces Burtynsky’s trip through China, photographing the nation’s rapid industrialization. This extraordinary and beautifully made film starts with a ten-minute tracking shot along the production lines in a vast Chinese factory. Looking down from above, we see rows and rows of workers and products stretching as far as the eye can see.