Damien Hirst or “Who determines the paths of money in art?”

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

If you too have caught wind of the newly erupted auction fever surrounding art and also believe that this is the best way to invest your money, you will surely be interested in which artists have achieved the best prices at auctions so far; perhaps you can learn something from looking at them.

Here is one of them: Damien Hirst, sculptor and conceptual artist, curator and painter, whose artworks fetch dreamlike prices.

If you are neither a rich man with exploitative tendencies nor a speculative stockbroker, but earn your money “honestly” , you will not be able to afford a Hirst, not even a tiny one, and not even a copy, for which the shrewd artist still charges thousands of pounds.

This fact makes the life and work of Damien Hirst a very suitable illustrative example when it comes to trading at auctions: Hirst is truly one of the absolute record breakers in the auction trade .

One could almost say he invented the self-initiated art auction, including the possibility of making a killing. How did Hirst come to this? Perhaps his career path sheds some light on it.

The discerning art world loves to discover rebels like Hirst

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

Although he now showed some rebellious tendencies, he always maintained a grade level at school that allowed him to graduate without difficulty (only in art is he said to have once received a 5).

Hirst showed an early inclination towards the morbid , which would later become the defining characteristic of his art: As a teenager, he was fascinated by illustrated pathology books and interested in photographs of wounds, including those of burn victims and people with venereal diseases. After graduating from high school in 1983, Hirst turned to art; his grades granted him access to the local art school, where, however, he did not remain for long.

to earn some money first , he went to London and worked in construction for two years before being accepted to study fine arts at the prestigious Goldsmiths College While it's often said that he wasn't among the most talented artists of his year, these judgments usually lack justification or evidence and are therefore difficult to assess. However, it's safe to assume that Hirst was among the brightest of his class: he proved it impressively.

Even as a student, he used his pronounced business creativity to circumvent the need to win over a gallery owner for his art before the start of sales successes: He simply took over the planning of the art exhibition himself, which took place in a warehouse in the Port of London in 1988 and achieved impressive success “Freeze”

With a sure sense for the sales-related advantages of the moment, he immediately declares the works exhibited by him and his fellow students to be the first exhibits of the “Young British Artists” , a movement founded there and on that very day.

Collectors and gallery owners, who always immediately seize upon such opportunities, readily embrace suggestions of this kind, hoping to later be celebrated as art discoverers. Fittingly, in Hirst's case, it was the advertising mogul Charles Saatchi , who took notice and promised to support any art Hirst might have in mind.

The “artist from precarious circumstances” quickly becomes a darling of the art world

In 1991, Hirst had his first solo exhibition in an empty shop on London's Woodstock Street, where he also managed to win over Jay Jopling Saatchi Gallery with his first animal installation.

In the following period, Hirst's major works were created: dead animals submerged in formalin containers; the shark with the beautiful title “The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living” (1991) became famous, followed by a school of fish, sheep, pigs, cows and calves in various stages of dismemberment.

There was always a lot of drama surrounding his works; the preserved sheep entitled “Away from the Flock” caused the outrage of animal rights activists in 1994, a visitor poured ink into the basin, the exhibition became a sensation and the sheep was then worth 250,000 pounds.

One of his rotting cow heads, attractively garnished with live maggots and blowflies and an Insectocutor that administered electric shocks to the insects, won Hirst the Turner Prize , the most important English award for contemporary art.

Another work from 1995, “Two Fucking and Two Watching” , featuring a rotting cow and a rotting bull, caused such bouts of nausea in the audience in New York due to its smell of decay that the American health authorities intervened.

But at least this grotesqueness of his work had made Hirst famous, even among people who had never considered setting foot in an art gallery.

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

In his early days, Hirst spoke about his intentions as an artist: He stated that he wanted to use his artworks to encourage viewers to reconsider their relationship and the relationship of today's society to death, and their relationship to animals, art, and reality.

That was soon to change, towards a more business-oriented attitude; in any case, he owed his meteoric rise to becoming one of the richest artists in the world not only to the skillful management of his art dealer Jay Jopling, but also to his own considerable talent for self-promotion .

When he was rich and famous, Hirst tried his hand at several forms of creativity: In 1996 he directed the short film “Hanging Around” , produced a pop music album called “Vindaloo” “Pharmacy” which opened in London in 1997 and served as a permanent exhibition space for his works in a prominent location.

His autobiography, “I Want to Spend the Rest of My Life Everywhere, with Everyone, One to One, Always, Forever, Now,” (see Amazon link for ordering the English original hardcover edition). During this time, nothing excitingly new happened in his art, apart from sustained financial success: In 2000, Hirst sold his work “Hymn” to Charles Saatchi for £1 million at his “New York Show.” In the following years, he lived comfortably off smaller sculptures, collages, and the so-called “Spot Paintings ,” canvases with equally sized colored dots that sold like hotcakes more as status symbols than as art.

In 2007, Hirst was in the mood for a bit of scandal again. He had a real skull cast in platinum, covered it completely with 8,601 diamonds (including a 50-carat stone the size of a pigeon's egg on its forehead), and called the whole thing "For the Love of God" —after a comment from his mother, who could only manage a loud "Good heavens!" to this idea. What she said when the skull was sold for 75 million euros has unfortunately not been recorded.

After that, things happened one after the other, and these blows were of a financially quite pleasant nature: “Lullaby Spring” , a steel frame with over 6,000 handmade painted plaster marbles, was auctioned at Sotheby’s in the same year for 14.5 million euros.

The diamond skull was followed by the most scandalous pieces: a partially gilded, inlaid bull, which lived up to its name “The Golden Calf” with a purchase price of 10.3 million pounds, another diamond-encrusted skull, and the bronze sculpture of a half-skinned, heavily pregnant woman – a nod to “Body Worlds”.

You can view this morbid artwork, one of Damien Hirst's more recent pieces – which has not been well received in the British town of Ilfracombe – in the short video on the website of the newspaper "Die Welt". According to numerous residents of the British town interviewed, the controversial sculpture is ugly and also degrades women.

Suddenly, Hirst is the villain of all true art lovers

Soon after Hirst had established himself in the art market and regularly raked in astonishing sums, the first negative reports appeared: Since Hirst relies on help in the production of almost all his artworks, his authorship was initially questioned.

Those who found this too simplistic, because, for example, there is so little discussion about whether the writer or the printer are the authors of a book, expressed doubts about its “authenticity” , which are much harder to refute.

Naturally, many established art critics suddenly deemed Hirst untalented and not at all innovative, believing his provocation of the masses was solely a means to make a lot of money. He also had problems with his gallerists; Hirst had been arguing for some time with his patron Charles Saatchi about who had actually influenced whom.

When Saatchi moved his gallery from the dilapidated factory in northwest London to an abandoned London City Council building on the Thames in 2003, Hirst felt the wood-paneled offices of the baroque palace were unsuitable for his works and stayed away from the retrospective that Saatchi organized in his honor.

This dispute ends with Hirst buying back several of his own works from the Saatchi collection through his dealer Jay Jopling, but the next conflict with a gallery owner is already looming: Since the mid-1990s, Hirst had been represented in New York by Larry Gagosian , a dealer known for driving up the prices of his artists and thus his own earnings by any means necessary, and Hirst's further development did not please Gagosian, so they part ways in 2012.

But even when journalists already “clearly sensed that Damien Hirst’s star was fading” in 2002, and former admirers of his work suddenly attributed his rise solely 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 you’re good if you get enough airtime” (Bob Chaundy in Damien Hirst: Shockaholic , with quotes from David Lee of the art magazine Jackdaw), Hirst continued on his path completely unfazed.

The Hirst Revolution: For critical minds, only a sensible answer to irrational rejection

Hirst even has the perfect answer to this sudden change of winds; he reacts in his own way, with an immensely lucrative result for him: In 2008, Hirst agrees to a coup with the auction house Sotheby’s that is unprecedented: He has almost 300 of his works auctioned directly in a two-day auction, bypassing his gallery owners, and thus takes in around 140 million euros, a far larger portion of which ends up in his pockets than if he had sold them through gallery owners.

Now Hirst has new admirers: His approach is quickly dubbed the “Hirst Revolution” , leading business schools are overflowing with enthusiasm and praising Hirst’s auction trading in management courses as a successful example of strategic innovation and the creation of new sales channels and new customer groups.

Hirst is even accused of wanting to rewrite the rules of the art market by no longer selling to traditional art lovers, but to Russian oligarchs, English hedge fund managers and Arab oil sheikhs.

Somehow it fits: These new admirers, rather ironically, come from the highest circles of the financial industry, and on the same day that Hirst's works were auctioned, the bank Lehman Brothers also went bankrupt ; the sums of money there, not spent on art but gambled away at the expense of investors, are estimated in the tens or hundreds of billions, not in “ridiculous millions”.

It is doubtful that Hirst wanted to rewrite the rules of the art market, and it is even more doubtful that the obviously quite clear-headed artist would come up with the idea of ​​putting these new rules in the hands of the aforementioned financial jugglers.

Hirst preferred to enjoy the retrospective at London's Tate Gallery , held in his honor in 2012, and otherwise lives peacefully with his family in Devon (and runs his considerable art business from there). If sympathetic souls lament that he is doing an injustice to the poor gallerists who invested so much time and money in his rise to fame, he could surely calculate for these sympathetic souls, down to about a million, exactly how much these gallerists have earned from him in the meantime.

In the Swiss newspaper Tages-Anzeiger, Paulina Szczesniak reported on the superstar Damien Hirst and his exhibition at London's Tate Modern, in which he had blowflies crawling over a skinned cow's head. More splendor, more disgust, more mass appeal is truly hard to imagine. The article can be found here: The Megalomaniac .

Focus Online also attempts to explain the controversy and offers approaches to the phenomenon of why this artist is so incredibly captivating -> Exhibition “Damien Hirst” in London – A man, a shark, a skull .

The following video provides an insight into the major exhibition at Tate Modern (in English):

Damien Hirst, by the way, donates a considerable portion of the money he receives from Russian oligarchs, English hedge fund managers, and Arab oil sheikhs to charity: He is a co-founder of Strummerville , a foundation dedicated to supporting young musicians. It was established in memory of the late Joe Strummer, the legendary punk musician and co-founder of the punk rock band "The Clash" .

Among his more well-known charitable activities is his support of Survival International , a movement that advocates for the rights of indigenous peoples. Hirst has not only donated to Survival International but also contributed a chapter to their 2009 book, "We Are One: A Celebration of Tribal Peoples." The list of other organizations Hirst has supported with material resources includes over a dozen names.

An overview of artworks by Damien Hirst, such as those currently offered for sale in international galleries or those being or have been auctioned, can be found at Artnet . However, if you are considering a purchase, please remember to have the necessary funds available.

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 the hype surrounding him will continue and have a lasting impact on the art scene?

Or is he rather a cleverly self-promoting, money-grubbing businessman who simply markets himself well with his shrewd calculations?

Share your opinion with us!