THERE it is, finally, as promised. The fluffy little lamb in formaldehyde by Damien Hirst that has become unofficial mascot for Artist Rooms, the concept that the National Galleries and the Tate are using to package their joint acquisition of 725 wor
ks of contemporary art from the former art dealer Anthony d'Offay.
The creature is stuck in its glass vitrine in some kind of eternal youth: forever fluffy and perky when all else will grow and wither around it. The piece's title Away From The Flock is designed to strike a religious chord. It is also ineffably British.
While other nations might boast bullfighting or battle scenes as their defining iconography, we Brits have traditionally boasted more sentimental images: fluffy clouds, fluffy women, fluffy sheep.
Back in February 2008, when the acquisition was announced – the deal was a part gift/part sale agreement costing £28m for a collection then valued at £125m – the world looked a very different place.
The chill winds of recession were not yet blowing. Market prices for contemporary art were booming. Russian oligarchs were still stalking the art market, like pantomime villains, with millions of dollars apparently stuffed in their pockets.
Damien Hirst had not yet staged his rather spectacular stock clearance auction that washed its face financially but rather washed out his fading cultural reputation.
Most importantly the National Gallery of Scotland had not yet been put in the unenviable position of having to raise £50m to acquire its most prestigious painting, Titian's Diana And Actaeon, and secure the continuance of the rest of the Bridgewater Loan from its owner the Duke of Sutherland.
So as the first instalment of Artist Rooms opened to the public in Edinburgh yesterday, with the spring weather veering from sunny to squally, and the economic forecast one of unremitting gloom, should we now all be feeling a little sheepish?
The strength of the Artist Rooms' concept is that instead of 725 individual works of art, it is a suite of 50 "rooms" of contemporary art by 25 artists including Damien Hirst, Andy Warhol, Gerhard Richter, Jeff Koons and Bruce Nauman. As well as bolstering the national collections these rooms will tour the UK from Orkney to St Ives, presenting art in context and expanding the usually metropolitan focus of our gallery system. Its weakness is that these are not great masterpieces, though they are indisputably blue chip works of art.
The rooms are the biggest single outing on the debut tour. There are five artist represented, but one, Hirst, is bound to dominate.
In a sequence of rooms that run from that earlyish sheep to a late bronze, Hirst is cast not as a trickster or iconoclast but as a heavyweight classicist.
There is a typical medicine cabinet, a decent early spot painting and the utterly spectacular Something And Nothing, a series of mirrored cabinets of natural history specimens holding preserved fish on one side and their fragile skeletons on the other.
A sequence of three vast wall-mounted cabinets packed with medical models is Hirst at his most overstated. These giant teeth and sliced plastic torsos are great fun in parts but titled Trinity – Pharmacology, Physiology And Pathology they are labouring under a religious metaphor too far.
The whole display clarifies both Hirst's strengths and weaknesses: the slick showmanship, the bombast, allied with the swift and genuine kick of mortal anxiety.
The most telling work is a rather unpleasant photograph taken of Hirst as a 16-year-old schoolboy. It shows him in a Leeds morgue next to the grotesque, disembodied head of a real cadaver. The child Hirst is grinning manically. It looks more like fear than fun.
For my money (and as a taxpayer it is my money and yours that has helped fund this acquisition with £10m each from the Scottish and UK Governments), the gems of this display lie in quieter places.
There is a wonderful suite of 18 vintage prints by the late Francesca Woodman, the American photographer who committed suicide in 1981 aged 23. Woodman's revered status is partly interwoven with her life story as an intensely creative and precocious young artist whose student work and early self-portraits seemed to anticipate or echo the feminist concerns of a whole generation of far more mature artists.
In the black and white images we see her use her own body as subject and object, dressed in Victorian lace or bluntly cropped and naked. This set of pictures belonged to her boyfriend Benjamin. She often scribbled notes to him on her work. "Bunny bun, I'm in the photolab," she wrote on one self-portrait on show. "Come fetch me if the mood or a rock should strike you."
It makes me uncomfortable to see such intimacy, to so blur the work and the life. Yet this is how these images were made and handled and remembered by Woodman's friends and family.
Quiet, too, are the extraordinary works of the Latvian-born artist Vija Celmins. Incredible, laborious works on paper, portraying the vast unending emptiness of the desert, sea and night sky in obsessive detail.
If all this seems quite dark, and despite the marked difference in tone all these artists seem to raise profound questions about the body and mortality, then the final artist room is devoted to the sunny and deceptively simple of the brilliant American figurative painter Alex Katz.
So, does Artist Rooms work? On balance I think so. The acquisition as a whole will plug big gaps to transform and contextualise the existing collections at both the Tate and NGS.
The work by Warhol, Woodman, Robert Mapplethorpe and Diane Arbus (about to go on show in Cardiff) is a massive boost for the fairly woeful collections of contemporary photography in Britain.
There are, inevitably, a handful of pigs in this giant poke: the vast-scaled and vacuous sculptures of Robert Therrien chief among them. I'll admit an underlying discomfort that our national heritage is being shaped not by incremental or ambitious collecting by curators but instead by the whims and genuine enthusiasms of a former dealer.
The real test for Artist Rooms will not be in Edinburgh, which, after all, is accustomed to housing modern and contemporary art, but in the smaller and often excellent regional museums and galleries which to date may not have had the permanent collections or the clout to stage shows with these kinds of artists.
More than 30 Artist Rooms will be on the move this year across the UK. I'm looking forward to seeing how the dark, flamboyant and outrageously homosexual works of Mapplethorpe will go down in Inverness and how Bill Viola's portentous video works will sit in Stromness at midsummer. My bet is that the collection will still look a bargain in that endless Orcadian light.
Until November 8
