Damien Hirsts' biggest fan Elizabeth Whelan: Adam Bostock

Damien Hirst takes the rich for a ride

Anyone following the record-breaking Sotheby's sale of Damien Hirst's work can't help but be stunned by the extraordinary sums of money being spent on the equivalent of flea market junk.

The sale is groundbreaking as Sotheby's, and other auction houses, do not generally auction new art. In this case however, they requested that Hirst assemble new works for this sale and the results have been quite remarkable. Hirst is a well-known money-making machine in the art world ( making a diamond encrusted skull that sold for 100 million dollars), and Sotheby's is as greedy as any other corporate animal.

This is not to say, however, that this stuff for sale is actually worth the money being spent. Most of what is for sale is the worst sort of 'what can we make them buy now?' mash-ups of dead animals and assorted detritus, gilded and set in glass cases, and mass produced in Hirst's studios by about 200 unnamed workers.

But this is of little matter to those involved. What constitutes the value of a piece at any given time is how much money a person is willing to spend for it. Right now someone with more money than sense is spending a packet on a stuffed dead horse with a narwhale's horn on it, supposedly passing as a unicorn. It is no surprise to find that this particular object does not hold it's value in the centuries to come.

Hirst's determination to removed the middleman (the gallery) from equation and go straight to the people is admirable, except that his target market is not the general public, it is those with the deepest of pockets and very little going on upstairs. Most who read this blog will not be spending 10.3 million pounds on a cow that is in a tank of formaldehyde with gilded hoofs and horns, called The Golden Calf, nor would they if availed of the chance to do so.

Damien Hirst is one of the best selling contemporary artists of our time, which shows you in a nutshell how bizarre the modern art collecting world has become. The man's work is a bunch of nonsense and yet who is the bigger fool, the one who creates this stuff or the one who buys it? I would definitely say the latter.

So Damien, you rock on with your bad self and I'll have you know I agree with your approach in a small sense. It is good to break the current standard that says all art of value should be sold through a gallery, as if that action somehow validates the work. However many galleries work very hard to represent their artists and promote/sell/ship etc., allowing the artist more time to create. There is room in the art world for both approaches.

I believe the reason that the galleries have so much stature has less to do with their hold over the artists and the market and more to do with the individual collector's inability to trust his own judgement. Without the intermediary telling them that this or that particular artist is collectable or 'good', the average person is afraid of purchasing a piece of art that they like.

And case in point, the ability to make these bad decisions is being showcased right now by individuals without knowledgeable guidance at this Hirst show!

Hirst and his money-making schemes aside (and that is all that this Sotheby's auction is), I say to anyone out there who want to buy a piece of art -- if you like it, buy it! If you enjoy looking at a painting or sculpture then it is worth whatever you paid for it, $5 or $5M.

And if you really want a shark encased in glass and floating in formaldehyde, Hirst just sold one for 9.5 million pounds but the Stuckist art movement is offering one for just 1 million -- a real steal!

Damien Hirst's shrinking: Adam Bostock

The market for artworks by Damien Hirst shrank by 93% between autumn 2008 and Autumn 2009, reports the latest issue of the Economist, and this year has been even worse. This has less to do with the recession than with the two-day sale at Sotheby's of Hirst's work in September 2008. The auction – held just as Lehmann Brothers fell across the Atlantic – was conceived by the artist himself as a work called Beautiful Inside My Head Forever; $270m (£175m) worth of art was sold. Buyers included a handful of billionaires from the former Soviet Union, Miuccia Prada and, it is thought, the Qatari royal family. The effect of offering for sale 233 lots, however, was to flood the market, meaning that now is not a great time to sell works by Hirst; rather, it's a buyers' market. Sellers ought to hang on: the Tate is in talks to mount a huge career retrospective of Hirst to coincide with the 2012 Olympics, the first since the 2004 survey at the National Archaeological Museum in Naples. At that point the market is likely to bounce.

Formaldehyde sculptures: Adam Bostock

Hirst’s sharks are icons of predatory power in purgatory—the natural history equivalent of a Francis Bacon pope. The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living was commissioned by Charles Saatchi and promoted as the headliner of his 1992 Young British Artists 1 show, re-exhibited on the three-stop tour of “Sensation”, then shown again when Saatchi opened his gallery in County Hall in 2003. Few works enjoy such marketing, but the ad man was trialling a new business model and, in 2004, he sold the king carnivore through Larry Gagosian to hedge fund tycoon Steve Cohen for $8.3m. However, a spokesman for Mr Saatchi declared that The Physical Impossibility…had sold for a spin-doctored $12m and the false benchmark price hit the headlines. The deal seemed to attract a different sort of billionaire to Hirst’s work.

Shortly after, Hirst started making more sharks in formaldehyde and collectors who helicoptered out to his Gloucestershire studio were invited to inspect the carcasses in the cold room. The Wrath of God, 2005, a baby shark on a white rectangular plinth, was exhibited in Mexico City and acquired by Lee Kun-Hee for a reported $4m. Death Explained, 2007, a larger shark split between two tanks, was bought by Hirst’s friend and hunting buddy, Victor Pinchuk. (The Ukrainian oligarch owns over 25 works—probably a handful more after the “Beautiful” sale—and is planning a Hirst solo show for June.) Then there were two shark works in the Sotheby’s auction: a solo shark titled The Kingdom which sold on the phone for £9.6m and four bull sharks in two tanks called Theology, Philosophy, Medicine, Justice, which failed to sell in the room and were purchased after the auction by Zurich dealer Andrea Caratsch for £2.5m. Furthermore, a single work consisting of seven sharks titled Seven Deadly Sins is believed to be on order for the ultra-secretive Paris-based collector Philippe Niarchos. Although the series is evolving its variations, Sandy Heller, Cohen’s art advisor, says: “In my opinion, there is only one shark.”

Before we move on to mammals, it’s worth discussing Hirst’s fish, if only because they may be the artist’s sexiest representation of women. The link is most overt in works like Love Lost, which consists of an oversized fish tank containing a gynecologist’s office and live fresh water fish. (Adam Sender bought it for $800,000 in November 2005.) An interviewer once remarked to Hirst that there was surprisingly little overt sex in his work. To which the artist replied: “When I tried to deal with sex, it always turned into murder.” Indeed, this is an apt evocation of a longstanding lesser known series of some 20 skeleton sculptures that go by the name of “Adam and Eve” and it captures the Jack-the-Ripper quality of figurative works like the bronze Virgin Mother and the marble Anatomy of an Angel. Even sweet Charity is crippled and her collection box violated.

In 1991, the same year in which he made his original shark, Hirst did a series of sister works of fish in formaldehyde, which are amongst his most elegant “natures mortes”. Isolated Elements Swimming in the Same Direction for the Purpose of Understanding, for example, consists of six rows of individually encased fish in two cabinets and was once described as a “static ballet in an absurd movement toward nowhere.” The first formaldehyde work to be shown in London (in a group show at the Serpentine), it too was purchased by Saatchi, travelled with “Sensation”, and then was bought back by Hirst in a £6m-for-12-works deal in 2004.

Hirst continues to produce exquisite works of suspended fish. One of the most dignified pieces in the “Beautiful” sale was a cruciform stainless steel cabinet containing fish skeletons on one side and fish in formaldehyde on the other. However, the “Beautiful” sale also contained a near replica of the iconic Isolated Elements wall-piece titled Can’t Live With You, Can’t Live Without You. It had 12 shelves rather than six and the fish were smaller but, formally, it was the same work.

Hirst’s re-making of works with minor variations and Andrew Lloyd Webber-style titles seems to be satisfying short-term demand amongst a new cohort of collectors, but many suspect that this recycling will have a negative effect on his brand reputation in the long term. Art historian Gilda Williams suggests a Pop art parallel. “Warhol would make as many works as he could sell; there are hundreds of Brillo boxes and Flower paintings,” she explained. “Beginning in the late 1970s, he cannibalised his early work with the ‘Reversals’ of his own iconic images of Marilyn and Mao.”

Dead animals in toxic chemicals would normally be the very definition of a difficult lot. Before “Beautiful Inside My Head Forever”, Hirst’s top 100 auction prices contained only four formaldehyde works. After the sale, his top 40 contained nine. An astonishing feat.

Earlier this year, Hirst donated an exhibition copy of his classic “romantic conceptual” cow-and-calf work Mother and Child Divided to the Tate, whilst Anthony D’Offay accessioned one of the three 1994 sheep titled Away from the Flock. This is good news. Hirst sceptics often remark on the artist’s relative lack of museum validation. Although his retrospective at the Museo Archeologico Nazionale in Naples was well received, it is the artist’s only large-scale survey to date. Although Hirst believers tend to reply that he doesn’t need the public sector, it is worth noting that the market has no memory and even if well-stocked private collections are open to the public, they rarely bring the footfall or the scholarship—and hence the sense of consequence—of a major national museum.

Reference: In and out of love with Damien Hirst

Making sense of spots, sharks, pills, fish and butterflies

By Sarah Thornton | From issue 195, October 2008
Published online 23 Oct 08 (Features)

Adam testing

Seeing how this works.

Example by Jay

Just trying this out for an example, now i realise this is the actual blong at 23:21... Idiot.