“There is an unutterable sadness to seeing Damien Hirst’s new paintings at Frieze. These big pictures of gardens, their blurry photorealism besmirched with Pollockesque drips in a desperate attempt to bring such duds to life, are the star turn at Gagosian. (…)

Hirst in the early 1990s made art seem unsafe, outrageous, like something that mattered in the world. Now he is painting gardens – which would be wonderful if he did it well. Unfortunately, he is no David Hockney. He still shows absolutely no talent for painting the real world. It is 14 years since Hirst first exhibited “proper” paintings by his own hand. He has learned nothing about the craft since. He is still bad, flat and unimaginative, yet he somehow gets a major display at the heart of an art fair that supposedly defines the new.

The misery of The Secret Gardens, as Hirst calls his snores, is not just that they are confirmation of his decline. It is also the fact these works are far from the dullest things here. Even in his dotage, Hirst has a bad-taste boldness that reminds you, vaguely, of what it’s like to see unexpected, exhilarating contemporary art. (…)

Perhaps I should take it all back about Hirst. Maybe he has a brutally accurate eye for the times. The avant garde is dead. The function of art now is to avoid frightening or shocking or, God forbid, exciting anyone. The deathliness of Hirst’s garden paintings conveys the dire truth about Frieze. It is a graveyard of creativity, not a blooming garden.”

(Jonathan Jones im Guardian)