Is this the birth of 21st-century art?

This isn't a disparagement of him, even if he had recently started to seem a bit saggy and sad, like a poorly preserved shark. It applies not just to Hirst's art before the skull but to what every artist in the world is doing at this moment. For the wonder at the crystalline heart of this exhibition is not only a memento mori, a death's head. It is also a birth, as scary as shattering as the one TS Eliot's Magi witnessed: a birth like a death. What is being born, exactly? It might be the art of the 21st century.

With his shimmering skull, birth paintings and bisected shark, Damien Hirst has redeemed himself, says Jonathan Jones

In pictures: See inside the exhibition

Tuesday June 5, 2007
The Guardian

The darkness is a work of art in itself. Perhaps it is the real work of art. The public visits that are carefully orchestrated at the gallery, with timed tickets and small groups and - obviously - draconian security, are restricted to two minutes. In two minutes your eyes can't adjust to the darkness. In two minutes the iridescent object can only register as a dream of eye sockets that are blue-green pools sunk into a shimmering spectral mask. As you move closer the ghostly head bursts into all the colours of the spectrum ... and then two minutes are up and you are escorted out of the building.

You can re-enter White Cube, Mason's Yard to see the rest of Damien Hirst's exhibition, and go to White Cube, Hoxton Square to take in still more of it. But after seeing the work he calls For the Love of God, it's not the same any more, looking at animals in formaldehyde and butterflies trapped in paint and fish arrayed on shelves.

The old dispensation of Damien Hirst's art - that immaculate pharmacy - doesn't seem as urgent, as real, after seeing his new order. This isn't a disparagement of him, even if he had recently started to seem a bit saggy and sad, like a poorly preserved shark. It applies not just to Hirst's art before the skull but to what every artist in the world is doing at this moment. For the wonder at the crystalline heart of this exhibition is not only a memento mori, a death's head. It is also a birth, as scary as shattering as the one TS Eliot's Magi witnessed: a birth like a death. What is being born, exactly? It might be the art of the 21st century.

Art does not follow the calendar's dividing lines. The art of the 20th century does not begin in 1900 but 1907, the year Pablo Picasso painted Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, whose masks and staring eyes and jagged limbs and shallow perspective could never have been imagined by Monet or even Cézanne. Exactly a century on, Hirst has created an object that has nothing to do with the 20th century, that owes as little to Marcel Duchamp as it does to Picasso, that has nothing to do with the Holocaust or 1917 or any of the 20th century's memories ... a work of art, in fact, that could have been created in any century but that one. Art has struggled to escape the 20th century because its first half was a great aesthetic period that cast a long shadow. Hirst, though, has broken through - for the second time.

This exhibition is a kind of autobiography, a restatement of who he is and what he has done. This suggests the kind of self-consciousness Picasso exhibited in 1907, or again in 1937 when he painted Guernica: the self-analysis of an exceptionally intelligent artist looking back on his achievements at the moment he transcends them. He has even revisited the masterpiece that started it all, the act of genius that came to him in his 20s.

The frustrating thing about The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living - the tiger shark Hirst placed in a tank of formaldehyde at the beginning of the 1990s - is trying to explain its power to anyone who didn't happen to walk into the Saatchi Gallery and see it when it was first exhibited. It was a stupendous, marvellous sight. It fulfilled the title because the shark, when you walked towards its mouth, really seemed to be alive and swimming towards you. You want to talk about the tradition of the memento mori, the reminder of impending death, in art? This was a memento mori, because it let you feel for a moment you were about to encounter man's most awe-inspiring predator, too close for survival.

The shark decayed. It shrivelled and shrank, and by the time it went back on public view, by the time Hirst was universally famous, his most important work was a leathery curiosity that belonged in some dusty corner of a natural history museum. It was, and is, still fascinating, and with his new work Death Explained he makes a virtue of its weakness. The new tiger shark downstairs at Mason's Yard makes no pretence to be alive - how could it after being sawn in two lengthways? Perfectly bisected, it is displayed in two tanks you can walk between; that is, you can stand inside a shark's mouth and in its stomach.

Hirst's animal sculptures, collectively called Natural History, are the most misunderstood artworks of our time. Routinely......

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Damien Hirst Beyond Belief is at White Cube, Hoxton Square and Mason's Yard, London, until July 7. Details 020-7930 5373.