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If nothing else, Damien Hirst is good at titles.

His best-known piece, the shark in formaldehyde, is called “The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living.”

As I walked round the retrospective of his career to date at London’s Tate Modern, which opens to the public on April 4, a variation on that popped into my mind: “The Psychological Impossibility of Accepting Creative Exhaustion in the Mind of Somebody Incredibly Famous.”

It’s not that this is a bad exhibition. On the contrary, here is perhaps the strongest case that could be made for Hirst, well-selected and elegantly displayed. It’s just that, on the evidence assembled at Tate Modern, he hasn’t had a good new idea in 20 years.

Almost all the ingredients of his art are already there in the first couple of rooms. Essentially, Hirst brings together extreme cognitive polarities: the pure beauty of modernist art, the messy biological complexity of life (and, more particularly, death).

In the late 1980s, Hirst, now 46, was already making geometrically-abstract art out of everyday objects such as cardboard boxes painted in primary colors. A photographic work, “With Dead Head” (1991), puts a smiling, youthful Hirst side by side with his other great theme: mortality, in the form of the decapitated head of an elderly and less cheerful corpse.

His most memorable move was to put life, and death, in a box. That is, to place preserved animals inside a container much like a sculpture by the American Minimalist, Donald Judd.

The shark remains the most potent incarnation of this idea: the feral ferocity of Darwinian nature just hanging there, frozen in time and space.

At that point, around 1992, Hirst produced works that made big obvious points with tremendous visual pizzazz. This was art for an age that knew all about genetic coding and the ultimate chemical and molecular basis of existence.

All of his basic ideas make similar points. The dot paintings are about how beauty and a carefree mood can be generated by a system that depends on chance (just like, perhaps, the beauties of nature and human emotions). Simple rules dictate the result: no repetition of a color, all dots the same size.

The spin pictures, produced by drizzling pigment onto a revolving disc, do the same trick for messy expressionist, Pollock-like paintings. The butterfly pictures are living, genetically derived beauty turned into abstract art, and so on.

Hirst’s problem is that none of these points required repetition. He doesn’t like the label “conceptual art,” arguing that his works are solid and real enough. But in another sense they are utterly dependent on an idea.

Pictures of people, or landscapes or abstractions like Pollock’s or Mondrian’s, can proliferate indefinitely because they are based on something subjective, the artist’s sensibility. There’s no reason for proliferating dot paintings or animals in tanks. They are all the same, an artistic clone.

The result was that Hirst quickly tipped over into self- parody. The later rooms of the exhibition find him producing his own brand of religious kitsch: butterfly collages with gothic, church-window tops, or a white, Holy Ghost-type dove in formaldehyde.

Alternatively, he reworked his earlier ideas in a style suited to a Qaddafi mansion (spot paintings on gold, butterflies on gold). The ultimate piece of plutocratic bling-art, Hirst’s diamond-encrusted skull, “For the Love of God’’ (2007) is exhibited downstairs in the Turbine Hall (until June 24).

In the past decade, he also made two series of figurative paintings, one photorealist, one in the manner of Francis Bacon. Not a single example of either is included.

“A Thousand Years” (1990), is one of Hirst’s most grisly early pieces in which flies hatch on a rotting cow’s head, breed, and die on a blue insect killer.

As you leave, you feel that the galleries of Tate Modern constitute one big tank in which Hirst himself is buzzing frantically about, trying to find a way out.

First Published on Bloomberg.com

Is an art gallery the right place to look at old pictures?

“Devotion by Design: Italian Altarpieces Before 1500,” an exhibition at the National Gallery in London, raises that question. Museums are full of objects that some people would say are in the wrong context. They are no more natural a habitat for many of their exhibits than zoos are for tigers.

Leaving aside items that were removed from archaeological sites and transported to museums in northern Europe and the U.S., there’s still the question of religious art. Many of the works in great collections originally were made for churches.

That applies to some of the best-known images in the National Gallery: Leonardo’s “Virgin of the Rocks,” Piero della Francesca’s “Baptism of Christ,” Masaccio’s “Virgin and Child.” All of them are fragments from larger ensembles, both visual and emotional. They have been cut out of their surroundings — often literally, with a saw — and stuck on gallery walls like butterflies in a case.

Altarpieces, as the name suggests, were placed on altars as part of a complex of ritual and belief. In front of them mass was said, candles were lit, incense burned, prayers offered up, hymns sung. None of that happens at the National Gallery, though “Devotion by Design” does a good job of recreating an ecclesiastical atmosphere.

The central gallery is transformed into something like a nave, with Signorelli’s grand “Circumcision” (1490) as the high altar, and others along the side walls. The piped liturgical music wafting in the background, however, is a tacky touch.

Most of the exhibition is concerned with putting dismembered altarpieces back together. In the late 18th and early 19th centuries, secular governments in Italy closed many religious institutions, monasteries and convents and sold surplus pictures.

Around the same time, collectors with avant-garde tastes began taking an interest in 14th- and 15th-century art. As Scott Nethersole writes in the catalog, “The art market responded to the demand for Italian ‘primitives’ by ruthlessly hacking them up, extracting saleable elements and discarding the rest.”

Often, the first thing to go was the frame, an integral part of the original. In the show, it’s possible to look at the back of a few that escaped the art dealer’s axe, including Giovanni dal Ponte’s “Ascension of St. John the Evangelist Altarpiece” (c. 1420). It’s an impressively elaborate piece of carpentry. (The frame for Michelangelo’s “Entombment” (1500-1) cost almost as much as his fee for the painting, according to the contract.)

Those ruthless 19th-century dealers have left a series of complicated jigsaw puzzles for art historians. Generally, they took apart polyptychs — multipanel altarpieces. After all, not many collectors have room for the whole enormous object. They traded the panels separately.

The result is that parts of a single work may be spread around half a dozen museums. Della Francesca’s “St. Michael” (1469) is one of four saints from the same altarpiece now in four different collections; the central Madonna and Child has vanished. Experts still are working on some of these puzzles.

Recreating completely the original context for such pictures — or for any work — is impossible. To do that, you’d have to resurrect 15th-century Italians, and see the works through their eyes. Still, this show is a useful reminder that altarpieces were intended for altars, and actually they have more meaning there.

First published on Bloomberg.com

The art duo Gilbert & George famously describe themselves as “two men, one artist.” What about the equally celebrated aesthetic twosome Jake and Dinos Chapman (who coincidentally once worked as assistants to G&G)?

I ask them that question in an interview. “We’re two boys, lots of artists,” Dinos replies.

There certainly is something more than a little boyish about the Chapmans, whose latest work is on show at the White Cube gallery’s two London sites. Perhaps “teenage” would be a more precise description of an artistic enterprise that revels in horror-comic violence, practical jokes, outrage to conventional good taste and lovingly detailed model-making.

The current dual exhibition has a novel twist to which the title gives the clue: “Jake or Dinos Chapman.” Normally, they collaborate closely. On this occasion they worked separately, and didn’t see each other’s efforts until a fortnight before the shows opened. So was there surprise when each brother revealed his efforts to the other?

“It was mildly familiar,” Jake says, “how I imagine senile dementia to be — you see things that have an uncanny familiarity.” In the installation, the productions they made in seclusion have been mixed together. Would they say who made what?

“No,” says Dinos. It would take a very close observer of the Chapmans to be sure of the division. I suspect that Dinos (born in 1962), the elder and more jokey one, is responsible for the boisterous one-liners; for example, a sculpted group of hooded children gazing at a painting of a gothic woodland scene. When you walk around the figures, you discover that from each cute childish face protrudes the sinister snout of a beast.

And perhaps it was Jake (born in 1966) — more wordy and theoretical — who crafted the multiple pastiches of abstract sculpture at Mason’s Yard. Which Chapman came up with the black- faced, uniformed Nazis who gaze in consternation at these examples of “decadent” art is anyone’s guess. In any case, neither sibling does anything startlingly new in these shows.

Apart from abstraction and Nazis — the latter a bit of a Chapman cliche — there are Baroque religious sculptures (with areas of skin unpleasantly peeled back) and a painting in the style of Bruegel contemplated by an aroused Ku Klux Klansman. Business as usual for the boys, you may say.

Underlying the cross-cultural knockabout is a philosophical point. The Chapmans think that the heroic, individual artist expressing his or her vision and emotions — Rembrandt, Van Gogh, Tracey Emin — is a myth.

“What we make has more in common with other art than it does with Jake and Dinos as people,” says Dinos. “I find it a strange idea that there are individuals. I don’t think that they exist.”

So what does exist? “Overlaps,” Jake promptly says. “The idea of thinking of art as a continuum of ideas is much richer and more interesting.”

Agreed, the Chapmans’ work is not about their feelings. It’s a cut-up of high culture and low culture, good taste and bad taste. The paradox is that a distinct personality nonetheless emerges — a blend of aggressive laddish humor and cool post-modernist theorizing.

They collaborate, Dinos muses, because they know each other. “It would be pointless to phone up someone you’d never met,” he says. Joint creation works, Jake adds, because it’s dysfunctional.

“When it stops working,” Dinos says, “I’ll sack him.”

First published on Bloomberg.com

The significance of the exhibition “Twombly and Poussin: Arcadian Painters,” at Dulwich Picture Gallery in London, changed abruptly a few days after it opened.

It was conceived as an exercise in compare and contrast between a contemporary artist and an old master (Nicolas Poussin, 1594-1665). With the news of Cy Twombly’s death on July 5, the natural response of a viewer shifted. Instead, this became a mini-retrospective of a historic figure in modern art, paired with pictures by a predecessor he revered.

In recent years, London audiences have caught up with Twombly, born in 1928. His painting — and also his less- familiar sculpture — was the subject of a triumphant exhibition at Tate Modern in 2008. That show proved that he made a unique contribution to the visual art of our times.

Or, to put it another way: There is nothing quite like a Twombly. As he said in a rare interview with Nicholas Serota, director of the Tate, he never took to the “Wagnerian American” mode of painting.

A generation younger than abstract expressionists such as Mark Rothko and Jackson Pollock, Twombly took their idiom and made of it something less grandiloquent and more quirkily intimate. Over 60 years, his work developed into one of the most rich and idiosyncratic oeuvres in contemporary art — loosely gestural, romantic, often containing stray words or fragments of poetry written onto the canvas.

Chilly Eroticism

Poignant though it has become in the light of Twombly’s death, it must be said that at first glance the Dulwich show is puzzling. These are two considerable artists from wildly diverse eras. Poussin (1594-1665) was the master classicist of 17th- century art. He took the carnal, erotic idiom of Venetian mythological painting and disciplined it into a stately, intellectual and, if you don’t like it, chilly grandeur.

So why put him on the same walls as Twombly? The basic premise is that Twombly, unexpectedly, loved Poussin. He told Serota, “I had different crushes on different artists. But I look a lot at Poussin.” And, even more vividly, “I would’ve liked to be Poussin, if I’d had a choice, in another time.”

There are more connections between Twombly and Poussin than you might imagine. Both were non-Italians — Poussin from Normandy, Twombly from Virginia — who ended up based around Rome. Each took inspiration from literature.

Twombly’s “Hero and Leander (To Christopher Marlowe)” (1985) deals with a classical legend of doomed lovers, a subject that Poussin might well have treated. Twombly’s picture, though, is operatically emotional and watery (Leander drowned while swimming to a tryst with Hero, a priestess of Aphrodite, goddess of love). It looks more like Monet than anything by Poussin.

Abstract Tradition

The U.S. artist comes at the far end of a painterly tradition to which Poussin belonged at a much earlier stage. Twombly pictures such as the pair “Untitled (Bassano in Teverina)” from 1985 on show at the Dulwich are evidence of that. In those works there is an image of vegetation, light, sky and clouds, abstract yet in the same tradition as Poussin and his contemporary Claude Lorrain. A Poussin picture, “Landscape with Travellers Resting” (1648) hangs nearby.

Even so, notwithstanding such art-historical echoes, this odd couple of painters have little, visually, in common. But suddenly, for the saddest of reasons, it’s welcome to have an opportunity to look at prime examples of Twombly’s work.

First published online at bloomberg.com

“Treasures of Heaven,” an excellent new exhibition at the British Museum in London, is full of precious objects. Gold and jewels glitter in dramatic lighting.

To the original makers and owners, however, it wasn’t the value of these sumptuous containers that counted but what was within: dry bones, splinters of wood and sundry organic remains.

This is about the cult of relics, one of the strangest aspects of Christianity to those who are non-Christians (and to quite a few who are). Some of the exhibits, leaving aside the fact that they are masterpieces of medieval craft, are surreal.

A life-size silver gilt representation of a head, made around 1210 perhaps in Basel, contains nine pieces of human skull. Allegedly, these belonged to St. Eustace, a Roman general who converted to Christianity after seeing a crucifix between the antlers of a stag.

Stranger still is a “Reliquary of the Foot of St. Blaise” — a 4th-century bishop from Armenia. It’s a highly realistic model from c. 1260 of what jazz pianist Fats Waller called “the pedal extremities” of the saint from the ankle down, fashioned from metals and rock crystal.

A few of the items on view go beyond mere oddity into the territory of Harry Potter. Toward the end of the show you come across the “Griffin’s Claw of St. Cuthbert.” A griffin is a mythological creature, half-eagle, half-lion. Its claws could only be obtained by a holy person in exchange for medical assistance. In 1385, St. Cuthbert’s shrine in Durham Cathedral had two of them, plus some griffin eggs. Disappointingly, the talon on display turns out to be the horn of an ibex.

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The whole world is changing, the great jazz musician Duke Ellington remarked in 1971. Consequently, he added, no one will be able to retain his or her identity and it becomes hard to tell who’s imitating whom.

The sculptural installation “Circle of Animals/Zodiac Heads” by the Chinese artist Ai Weiwei currently installed in the courtyard of Somerset House, London, (through June 26, and concurrently in Grand Army Plaza, New York, until July 15) is a perfect demonstration of Duke’s point.

This is, like many of Ai’s ideas, a deceptively simple notion that sets off a disorientating, even dizzying, chain of thoughts. It’s a recreation of 12 bronze heads of beasts, representing the Chinese astrological signs, that once decorated a combined fountain and water clock in the Old Summer Palace outside Beijing.

That might sound straightforward. Ai has learned well the lesson of Marcel Duchamp: how to make the maximum intellectual and aesthetic effect with the minimum means. In this case, the ironies and complexities begin with the origin of the fountain.

It was designed and cast by two Jesuits, Giuseppe Castiglione and Michel Benoist, who were resident in China. Castiglione’s work as a painter is an early example of cultural globalization, Eastern and Western in more or less equal measure.

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here’s some great art in the Venice Biennale. Mind you, the best isn’t necessarily contemporary.

The main exhibition, ILLUMinations (Central Pavilion of the Giardini and the Arsenale) starts off with three magnificent canvases by the 16th-century painter Jacopo Tintoretto.

This neatly makes the point that art doesn’t really progress, and its raw ingredients — form, color and light — are constant. Tintoretto also sets a high standard for the 83 artists of the 21st century exhibiting in the art galleries at the two venues. That said, there are some showstopping items en route.

The Biennale director on this occasion, Bice Curiger from Switzerland, means the title of the main show metaphorically: mental enlightenment that might come from art. The name of the Biennale exhibition is always vague (“Plateau of Humanity” from the 2001 Biennale still wins my prize for lack of meaning).

This time, a few of the more outstanding pieces actually are about light. The U.S. artist James Turrell has contributed one of his Ganzfeld series, where extraordinary spaces in changing light appear to create solid walls and magically alter perceptions.

Halfway down the vast array in the Arsenale, the Swiss artist Urs Fischer displays a brilliant conceit: a full-scale cast of Giovanni Bologna’s 16th-century sculpture, “The Rape of the Sabine Women.” The catch is that this is entirely composed of candle wax. The whole three-figure Mannerist farrago will burn away during the run of the 54th Biennale — art literally giving light. Already, the lower figure is melting badly at one knee.

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The 54th is not the best of Venice Biennales, nor the worst. It must be the biggest ever.

While new nations are represented — including Andorra, India, Iraq andSaudi Arabia — overall the impression is of homogeneity not diversity.

True, there is sometimes a local accent. For example, the Saudi Pavilion shows “The Black Arch” by the sisters Raja and Shadia Alem, a striking work that fuses lights, mirrors, moving projection and music in a modern fashion and with a nod to Islamic art of the past.

The big point, more obvious with every Biennale, is that modern art — which only a few decades ago was a largely Western fad — is now a pan-global language.

Another theme is the alliance between contemporary art and modern merchant princes. Roman Abramovich’s black mega-yacht was in town, docked near the Biennale gardens and surrounded by a security fence. The billionaire French businessman Francois Pinault, now de facto the modern art Doge of Venice, gave the grandest and most stylish party (in the cloisters of San Giorgio Maggiore).

Pinault’s two substantial museums, at the Palazzo Grassi and Punta della Dogana, are nonetheless slightly outshined by the Fondazione Prada, which opened a Venetian headquarters at the 18th century Ca’Corner della Regina.

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Dirt, the anthropologist Mary Douglas wrote, is simply “matter out of place.”

That’s a wide definition which would apply, for example, to virtually everything currently located on my desk. Yet its very messiness and slipperiness as a concept make it a fertile subject for an exhibition: “Dirt: The Filthy Reality of Everyday Life” at the Wellcome Collection in London.

Dirt, of course, can be fertile, as is stressed by the old northern British dictum, “where there’s muck there’s brass,” or, for those readers who don’t speak Yorkshire, dirt and money go together. Recently, P.J. O’Rourke made a similar point: The modern city is the mess people make when they get rich.

As it turns out, London is partly made of the stuff. In the early-19th-century large mounds, “dust heaps,” rose above the urban landscape (they loom in a sinister fashion over Dickens’s novel, “Our Mutual Friend”). There’s a view of one on show, a small white mountain rising above the houses of King’s Cross. This detritus was mixed with mud, ash and other refuse and turned into bricks — or, as we say these days, recycled.

The exhibition, however, begins with an opposite cliche: Cleanliness is next to godliness. That, it seems, was decidedly the view of the 17th-century Dutch, who may well have been modern Europe’s first hygiene obsessives. As is stressed in the paintings of Pieter de Hooch (1629-1684), they were big on sweeping, polishing and scrubbing. De Hooch’s contemporaries gave a high moral value to being spick and span.

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Sometimes life really does seem to imitate art. When Nick Clegg and David Cameron appeared for that first joint press conference last May, more than one sketch writer came up with the same comparison: Gilbert & George.

What’s more, G&G noticed too. “It was very amusing. We were flattered, of course,” says George in an interview at their new exhibition “The Urethra Postcard Pictures” in White Cube, Mason’s Yard, London. “It was like a marriage,” adds Gilbert. G&G themselves contracted a civil partnership in 2008, after four decades of life together as a single artistic personality.

Like G&G, Cameron & Clegg often wear coordinated, though not identical suits (the former were sporting brown and green versions of the same natty tweed on the day we talked). G&G always have claimed to be two men, but one artist. Now we in Britain have government by two parties with — more or less — a single set of policies. Are G&G supporters?

In the past, they professed loyalty to the Conservative Party, especially under the leadership of Margaret Thatcher (it was, among other things, a good way to rebel against the left- leaning art world). Do they now support the coalition?

“Oh, yes,” they say in chorus. Both parties equally? “We have to be fair,” George states firmly. “We think they are doing a good job under very difficult circumstances.”

“We were brought up with the motto: Neither a lender nor a borrower be,” says George. “We never borrow money,” Gilbert chimes in. As so often with G&G, there’s a twist to this thought. “They have made cuts, but we say they should only be in Labour constituencies, because Labour incurred the debt. Fair’s fair.”

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