THE INDEPENDENT: By Charles Darwent: Damien Hirst: Two Weeks One Summer, White Cube Bermondsey, London; Tracey Emin: She Lay Down Deep Beneath the Sea, Turner Contemporary, Margate
The sharks are circling Damien while Tracey displays a quiet maturity in her latest work

Here, by the door, is Brown Jug of Water with Scissors, one of 35 paintings in a show by Damien Hirst. That is not paintings as in spots but paintings as in still lifes, or sort of. After the richly deserved mauling Hirst's last canvases received, sheer perversity makes you want to like these new ones, or at least to annoy people by affecting to. But as Brown Jug quickly proves, it cannot be done.

Let's be fair. When you walk into the echoing room in which Hirst's new paintings hang, the impression is of prettiness. The concrete floor, waxed to an expensive gloss, reflects the nearly three dozen pictures, most of which include sprigs of blossom. Some paintings are biggish, some smallish, some hung alone and others in series. For a moment, there seems to be a rhythm, maybe even a painterly intelligence. Then you look again and see that Hirst is a set designer, not a painter.

Up close, Brown Jug of Water with Scissors seems oddly old-fashioned, like a Ben Nicholson post-Alfred Wallis. The difference is that Nicholson painted badly on purpose; Hirst doesn't. Nicholson's work was good-bad, Hirst's ... well.Read more