Spot Paintings for the Ninety-Nine Percent
Limitless Idea Project presents the Incompletable Spot Paintings, online at www.unsafeArt.com/Damien-Hirst-Style. Interact with 11 galleries - a gallery for each arrangement of colored spots - and their inexhaustible random color combinations. 
Like the Compete Spot Paintings by Damien Hirst, these virtual exhibitions allow viewers to contemplate the wide world of colored circles - but in a near-infinite way. A new painting appears each time the screen is refreshed, and so viewers can easily see as many, or more, combinations of spots than Hirst painted. Colored circles may seem like a simple subject, but Hirst spent the past 25 years painting them. And hundreds of them are being shown in multiple exhibitions this year. Arrangements of this handy shape, with an infinite number of sides and unending loopyness, is one element of both sets of spot paintings: the complete and the incompletable ones. The second constraint, for both, is the randomization of color.
Unlike Damien Hirst's work being shown at 11 Gagosian Galleries around the world, the virtual spot paintings are available to anyone with a modern Internet browser - one that supports HTML5. To see all these spot iterations, viewers don't need a jet-set bank account. No need to get on a plane, just on the Internet.
Hirst freely admits he didn't paint all his spots. He employs painters, and by doing so is saying that t he magical talent of the artist isn't necessary to set up his world of spots and their complex relationships. The virtual spot paintings eliminate the craft of painting entirely.
None of the circles or colors in the Incompletable Spot Paintings were ever drawn, painted, or even photographed, nor are they generated by a graphic program like Illustrator, Photoshop or Paint. They are created by text and the collaboratively-created programming that is the guts of browsers like Mozilla Firefox, Opera, Google Chrome and Internet Explorer 9.
Regardless of how the images are made, both the cloth and the virtual canvases make pure statements about the juxtaposition of color. As Hirst explained, "I was always a colourist, I've always had a phenomenal love of colour... I mean, I just move colour around on its own. So that's where the spot paintings came from - to create that structure to do those colours, and do nothing. I suddenly got what I wanted. It was just a way of pinning down the joy of colour." (http://ateliertally.com)
"I started this project in January when I heard Damien Hirst was going to give a print to anyone who went to all the galleries showing his spot paintings," said Terry Talty, a conceptualist, who made the virtual paintings. The shows went up mid January and all will be closed by March 17. "I couldn't visit Hong Kong for a day, and then dash off to some other place that I'd like to visit for a month. So, I didn't even confront the fact that I don't have the time or the money. I made these paintings for all of us who can't get out and smell the paint, for those of us who don't have the time or money to visit every gallery."
Viewers who look at all the virtual prints and comment on the blog about the work will also be given a prize. This prize, nor Hirst's giveaway print, have been determined by mid February 2012.
