Damien deer or "Who determines the paths of money in art?"

Damien Hirst - the “inventor” of lucrative art auction?

If you also get wind from the newly broken auction fever around art and also believe that you can best invest your money in this way, you will certainly be interested in which artists have previously achieved the best prices at auctions, maybe you can learn something when considering.

Here is one of them: Damien Hirst, sculptor and concept artist, curator and painter, whose works of art achieve fantastic prizes.

If you are neither bonze with tendencies for exploitation nor speculative stock exchange broker, but earn your money “honestly” , you will not be able to afford a deer, not even a very tiny one, and no copy, even for the business artist or thousands of pounds.

This fact makes the life and work of Damien Hirst a well -suited visual material when it comes to trade in auctions: Hirst is really one of the absolute records in auction trading .

One could almost say that he invented the self -intimated art auction, including the possibility of cleaning up there properly. How did Hirst get there? Maybe his career provides information about it.

The subtle art world likes to discover rebels like Hirst

Damien Hirst was born in the pretty English city of Bristol in 1965, from which the family soon moved to less charming Leeds, where the father found work as a car mechanic. When Hirst was 12 years old, the father left the family, the now single mother, according to his own statement, lost control of her son early.

He now lived out a few rebellious sides, but always stayed at a grading level at school, which led him to the Abitur without difficulty (only in art he should have received a 5).

penchant for the morbid early on , which was later to become the characteristic characteristic of his art: as a teenager, he was fascinated by illustrated pathological books and was interested in photos of wounds, including those of fire victims and sexual sick. After graduating from high school in 1983, Hirst moved to art, his grades opened his access to the local art school, but he did not endure it for long.

In 1984 he wanted to earn money , he went to London and worked on the construction for two years before he was accepted in 1986 at the famous Goldsmith's College to study free arts. If it is read that he was not one of the most talented artists of his year, these judgments usually do without reason or evidence, so it is difficult to assess. The brain was one of the clever of his year, can be assumed: he has impressively demonstrated it.

Already as a student, he was bypassed the need to inspire a gallery owner for his art before the start of the sales success: he himself simply took over the planning of the art exhibition, which took place in 1988 in a warehouse in the port of London and obtained impressive success "Freeze"

With a safe sense of the sales of the hour, he explains the works issued by him and his fellow students, as well as the first exhibits of the "Young British Artists" , a movement founded there and on that day.

The collectors and gallery owners, who always track down such events immediately, are happy to take up suggestions of this kind in order to be celebrated as an art discoverer later. At Hirst, it was fittingly the business as well as art-sophisticated advertising mogul Charles Saatchi , who became aware of and promised him to promote any art that Hirst had in mind.

The “artist from precarious conditions” quickly becomes a favorite of the art world

In 1991 Hirst had his first solo exhibition in an empty shop in the London Woodstock Street, in which he was also able to win over Jay Jopling Saatchi Gallery with his first animal installation.

Subsequently, Hirst's main works, dead animals sank in formalin containers, the shark was famous with the beautiful title "The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living" (1991), followed by a swarm of fish, sheep, cows and calves in various stages of dismemberment.

There was always a lot of theater about his works, the inserted sheep, entitled “Away from the Flock”, excited the displeasure of animal rights activists in 1994, a visitor poured ink in the pool, the exhibition became a sensation and the sheep was then worth £ 250,000.

One of his rotting cow heads, appealingly garnished with living maggots and throwing flies and an in -sectocutor , who gave the insects to the insects, Hirt introduced the gymnast prize , the most important English award for contemporary art.

Another 1995 work, "Two Fucking and Two Watching" with a decaying cow and a decaying bull, caused such nausea in the audience due to his smell of decay in the audience that the American health authorities step in.

But at least, this grotescent of his work had made Hirst known, even among the people who had still come up with the idea of ​​putting a foot in an art gallery.

Damien Hirst learns a lot and quickly, from the creators of the art world and from other financial sharks

In his beginnings, Hirst was still out of his intentions as an artist: he stated that he wanted to encourage the viewers with his works of art to rethink their relationship and the relationship between today's society to death, and their relationship with animals, art and reality.

That should change soon, towards a rather business -specific attitude, in any case he had the steep climb to one of the richest artists in the world not only owe to the skillful management of his art dealer Jay Jopling, but also the considerable own talent for self -marketing .

When he was rich and famous, Hirst tried to creativity in several varieties: he took over the direction of the short film "Hanging Around" , produced a pop music album called "Vindaloo" "Pharmacy" restaurant opened in 1997 , a permanent exhibition location for his works in a prominent location.

In 1998 his autobiography "I Want to Spend the Rest of My Life Everywhere, with everyone, one to one, Always, Forever, Now" appeared (see Amazon-Link to order the original edition in the original edition in a bound edition, except for permanent financial success, nothing exciting: In 2000, it was on his "New York Show" Work "Hymn" for £ 1 million to Charles Saatchi, in the following years he lived well from smaller sculptures, collages and the so-called “spot paintings” , canvases with the same size, which are more likely to find a status symbol than art.

In 2007 Hirst made a bit of scandal again, he lets a real skull made of platinum pour in, filled him with 8,601 diamonds (on the forehead a pigeon-sized 50-child) and calls the whole "for the love of God" -after a statement by his mother, who is no more than a sound "for heaven!" had come up with this idea. What she said when the skull was sold for 75 million euros has unfortunately not been handed down.

After that it went in a blow, and these blows were financially pleasant: “Lullaby Spring” , a steel frame with over 6,000 handmade painted plaster murmurs, is auctioned at Sotheby’s in the same year for 14.5 million euros.

The diamond skull was followed by a partially gilded bull, which laid out his name "The Golden Calf" with a purchase price of 10.3 million pounds, another diamond -occupied skull and the bronze plastic of a half -sided woman, "body worlds" with a purchase price of 10.3 million pounds.

You can examine this morbid artwork, one of the recent work of Damien Hirst - which is not well received in the British Ilfracombe - in the short video on the homepage of the newspaper "Die Welt" itself. According to numerous interviewed residents of the British town, the controversial sculpture is ugly and also degraded women.

Suddenly Hirst is the villain of all true art lovers

Soon after Hirst prevailed on the art market and regularly cleared up to amazing sums, the first negative reports were read: since Hirst is dependent on help with almost all of his works of art in the manufacture, his authorship was initially questioned.

Who was too cheap because it was z. For example, there are so few discussions about whether the writer or the printer are the author of a book, the extremely doubts about the “authenticity” to refute much more difficult.

Of course, Hirst was suddenly unaccoluntary for many established art critics and not in the least innovative, and his provocation of the masses was only there to make a lot of money. There is also trouble with his gallery owners, Hirst has been arguing with his patron Charles Saatchi for a long time about who did whom here.

When Saatchi and his gallery from the dilapidated factory in northwestern London in 2003 moved to an abandoned seat of the London city administration on the Thames, Hirst felt the wood -paneled office space of the Baroque palace as not suitable for his works and remains the retrospective that Saatchi organizes in his honor.

This conflict ends with the fact that Hirst bought several of his own works from the Saatchi collection over his dealer Jay Jopling, but the next dispute with a gallery owner has already indicated that Hirst has been represented by Larry Gagosian , a dealer who is known for the prices of his artists and thus also his own earnings, and browsing was able to continue developing, and browsing further development Don't please, you separate in 2012.

But even if journalists “feel clear in 2002 that Damien Hirsts is going to go down” and former admirers of his work suddenly only attributed his rise to the fact that “he was the person who understood that visibility was everything in the art world of the 1990s” and that “People assume that you are good if you only get enough broadcasting time” (Bob Chaundy in Damien Freu: Shockaholic with Quotes from David Lee from Kunstmagazin Jackdaw), Hirst continued completely unimpressed.

The Hirst revolution: For critical spirits, only a reasonable answer to unreasonable rejection

Hirst even has the right answer to this sudden envelope of the wind, he reacts in his way, i.e. with an incredibly lucrative result for him: in 2008 Hirst agreed with the Sotheby’s : he has almost 300 of his works in a two -day auction and thus occupies around 140 million euros to a much greater part in his pockets a sale via gallery owner.

Now Hirst has new admirers: his procedure is quickly titled as a “Hirst revolution” , the leading business schools overflow themselves with enthusiasm and praise Hirst's auction trade in management courses as a successful example of strategic innovation and creation of new sales channels and new customer groups.

Hirst is even assumed that he wants to rewrite the rules of the art market if he no longer sells to traditional art lovers, but to Russian oligarchs, English hedge fund managers and Arab oil pig.

Somehow that fits well: these new admirers are spicy from the highest circles in the financial sector, and on the same day, when Hirsts were auctioned, the Bankhaus Lehman Brothers also went bankrupt , which are not spent there for art, but at the expense of investors, are estimated in two or three-digit billions of billions, not in “ridiculous million”.

The fact that Hirst wanted to rewrite the rules of the art market can be doubted, and the fact that the obviously pretty head -clear artist would come up with the idea of ​​putting these new rules into the hands of the above financial jugglers, can be even more doubted.

Hirst preferred to enjoy the retrospective in the London Tate Gallery , which was held in his honor in 2012, and otherwise lives peacefully in Devon with his family (and runs his remarkable art business from there). If sympathetic souls cry that he is wrong to the poor gallery owner who would have invested so much time and money in his ascent, he could certainly calculate this compassionate souls up to about a million exactly how much these gallery owners have earned in the meantime.

In the Swiss day indicator, Paulina Szczesniak reported on the superstar Damien Hirst and his exhibition in the London Tate Modern and how he had pouring flies crawled over a skinned cattle head. More splendor, more disgust, more mass suitability is probably not possible. The article here is: the megalomaniac .

FOCUS Online also tries in explanations of controversy and provides approaches to the phenomenon why this artist captivates so enormously -> exhibition "Damien Hirst" in London -a man, a shark, a skull .

In the following video you can get an insight into the big exhibition in Tate Modern Erlangen (in English):

By the way, the money of the Russian oligarchs, English hedge fund managers and Arabic oil sheikhs spent in little parts for charitable purposes: he is a co-founder of Strummerville , a foundation to promote young musicians. It was created in memory of the late Joe Strummer, the legendary punk musician and co-founder of the punk rock band “The Clash” .

His more well -known charity activities also include the support of “Survival International” , a movement that represents the rights of the indigenous peoples, for “Survival International” not only donated, but even wrote a chapter in 2009 published book “We Are One: A Celebration of Tribal Peoples”. The list of organizations that are otherwise supported by Hirst with material means contains a dozen names.

find an overview of Damien Hirst works of art by Damien Hirst, which are or have been auctioned or were auctioned at auctions, for example in international galleries . However, when weighing up, remember to keep the necessary “change” ready ...

Art by Damien Hirst on Pinterest

Is Damien Hirst one of the most important artists of our time? Are his works innovative or even revolutionary? Do you think that the hype continues around him and that the art scene has a lasting impact?

Or is he rather a cleverly staging, money -greedy businessman who simply markets himself well with his ingenious calculation?

Let us know your opinion!