Spot Paintings Latest Art Craze: But Is It Good Art?

It is claimed Damian Hirst only painted 5 of the 300 spot paintings being exhibited in 11 galleries across the world. Now another artist Dave Summer is creating spot art digitally on a computer. Are human beings even necessary to create art?

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Spot Paintings have become the latest ‘craze ‘ in the art world. Damian Hirst’s exhibitions of 300 spot paintings at Gagosian’s 11 galleries across the world is causing a media stir. Hirst reportedly claimed that he only painted five of the 1,400 in existence.

Artist Dave Summer has taken the process one step further by not painting the images at all. “It’s not worth all the fuss and bother actually painting them” he said. “I use a simple software system called DoodleCAD. It takes me about 5 minutes to do each one. The resulting spot images have a cleaner, more vibrant look than is possible using messy old-fashioned paint and canvas. Mine are sharper, cleaner and, I think, better than Hirst’s painted spot paintings”.

http://www.art-n-stuff.com/news/

These comments raise interesting questions about the way contemporary visual art is moving. Do we even need human intervention to produce art one might wonder? A computer program could easily be written to generate randomly colored spots in geometric arrays. Would this automated procedure necessarily be less capable of generating art than what Damian Hirst does?

www.art-n-stuff.com is offering hand-signed and numbered digital Spot Image prints in editions of 1000 for £20 (A4 size), £30 (29.7 x 29.7 cm) or £40 (A3 size).

This is a fraction of the price reached by Hirst for his spot paintings. For those who prefer their art on canvas, art-n-stuff.com is offering print any image on canvas and have it shipped within a few days.

But simply putting something on canvas obviously doesn’t make it good art. While gallerists like Gagosian and quite a few collectors are taking spot painting seriously, or so it appears, but is spot painting good art, I wonder?