It is noon, three days before the opening of Damien Hirst’s new exhibition at Larry Gagosian’s shop in New York. There is a sign on the frosted glass doors of the gallery indicating that the place is closed “for installation”, but the human traffic through those doors is none the less fairly constant – a throng of critics, collectors, curators and television crews, swarming in for a first glimpse of the works that Hirst and his army of studio assistants have been working on for the past two years and more. There is snow on the ground and a bitterly cold wind gusts along West 24th Street, between 10th and 11th Avenues. A little way down the road, a billboard proclaims the optimistic credo that “Artists don’t need galleries, they just need walls.”

The truth is that the most sought after artists are represented by the biggest galleries, and the biggest galleries have the best walls. Gagosian’s New York gallery is the biggest of the lot: a cavernous series of interconnecting spaces, with tall ceilings and a positively vast acreage of wall space, all freshly painted in standard Modern Art White. The scene within is one of controlled chaos, overseen by a cheerful and benevolent gallery staff. The space is already liberally hung with pictures – this is purely a paintings show, a first for the artist – but many works are simply propped against the walls, while Hirst’s team, flown in from his studio in South London for the occasion, continues to work on them. These young men and women (mostly women), armed with paintbrushes and palettes, are busy putting the finishing touches to a cornucopia of photo-realist paintings which vary in size from the monumental to the modestly domestic. Music plays as they gingerly perform...

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