Making a fortune
Damien Hirst talks about how it's all about being lucky.
Damien Hirst is kneeling on the floor of a London gallery, doodling away. The 44-year-old artist is showing the media his new exhibition, “No Love Lost,” at the Wallace Collection. He draws animals and a heart in a catalogue for an autograph-seeking photographer.
Hirst has stopped pickling sharks and sheep, and ended his spot-and-spin series to take up old-fashioned oil painting. The new charcoal-and-blue canvases remind you of Francis Bacon, and stand in the kind of gilded frames that Bacon used. Yet there are also signature Hirst elements: shark jaws, lots of skulls.
The artist joins me for a conversation in front of one. In the next room are a Rembrandt and Titian that he recommends to visitors in a Wallace handout. He wears his goggle-like Prada frames, a dark jacket, and a T-shirt marked “The Shock of the New” (after the Robert Hughes book and TV series).
I ask why he has abandoned spots and dead animals to take up the paintbrush when many consider painting to be dead. He says painting “went out of fashion” because people took photography to be “the truth”.
“Now that photography is not to be believed, and it’s computers generating images, I think painting’s back,” he says.
Hirst is one of the world’s three most expensive living artists. At a two-day Sotheby’s auction in September 2008 — and even as Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. collapsed on the first day — Hirst raised 111.5 million pounds (then $199 million) selling works directly to buyers.
“That was a great point for me to draw a line under all that stuff and move on,” he says. “I started all those works as endless series, but I got to the point where I made enough to realise it was implying an endless series.”
What if the new works are seen as Bacon imitations? “I hope not: I’m hoping there’s enough of me in there,” says Hirst. He recalls that one of the lessons he learned at London’s Goldsmiths College was “to not borrow ideas: steal them”. “There’s a lot of other people in everything I’ve ever done,” he declares.
The Ukrainian steel billionaire Victor Pinchuk, who showed Hirst works at his Kiev museum in April, owns “probably half” of the skull paintings in the Wallace exhibition. Will the rest be sold? “No, they’re owned by me,” says Hirst. A newer set of works will be on sale at White Cube, Hirst’s London dealers, next month, he says.
The recession in the contemporary-art market — where dealers say prices have dropped as much as 30 to 50 per cent this year — has not led him to cut prices, he says: “We do have less sales.”
“People are buying more carefully,” he says. Where once a work sold over the phone on the basis of a photograph, and deals were done on a handshake, buyers today “will come and look three or four times and then make a decision”.
“If they take a long time buying something, they tend to hang onto it for longer, so it’s kind of good,” he says. Before, people were speculatively “buying it and selling it,” a trend he doesn’t miss. I point out that his Sotheby’s auction in September 2008 is now considered a work of art, with a room devoted to it at “Pop Life,” a current exhibition at Tate Modern. How does it feel?
He flashes back to September 15, 2008, the day his auction began — and Lehman died. “I woke up that morning, and the newspaper said ‘Black Monday,’” he remembers. “I just thought, ‘Oh my God, it’s all over.’ I just had the worst thoughts imaginable, I wished we’d never started it.’”
He says people now call him “a very clever businessman,” and he tells them, “Jeez, do you know how close that was?” “It’s more luck than anything else. I’m a lucky guy!” comes the explanation.
What if the Sotheby’s auction turns out to have been the climax of his career? “There could be worse climaxes, couldn’t there?” he fires back, then leaves for his next appointment after a friendly handshake.