Jerry Saltz has been using his Facebook page to ask artists to make him facsimiles of famous works that seek to remove the artist’s hand from the production process. He’s offered to pay for a Richter Abstract painting and a Hirst Spot. Artist Daniel Maidman took him up on the offer to make a Spot painting and discovered a real appreciation for the works.

Maidman’s post on the process explores Roberta Smith’s comments on the color choices. The post is worth reading. Though be warned ahead of time that he takes quite a bit of space to make his point. Here’s an example below:

It seems crucial that the colors have been chosen by different people; it is part of their randomness and creates a variety that might not be possible if the paintings were made by one person. In this regard Mr. Hirst’s spot paintings are more collaborations than art made by assistants. They are made not only by different hands but also by different minds, and this may be the most interesting thing about them.

From an information-theory perspective, what Ms. Smith is describing is not randomness, but redundancy. Each assistant makes characteristic color choices and juxtapositions, causing the spot paintings, as executed, to deviate from true randomness, from maximum entropy: “This crimson spot tells me Joe the Assistant made this painting; I can assume there will be no pale pink spots in this painting, because Joe does not use that color.”

I can report that these distinctions are more or less borne out by my own experience with the spot paintings (while his assistants choose the individual colors in the paintings, I suspect Hirst has carefully identified the parameters of the palette – an oddly shaped color space, for instance, would make sincere forgeries – unlike mine – next to impossible to produce).

How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love Damien Hirst’s Spot Paintings (Huffington Post)