Damien Hirst is about to auction 223 new works of art - a typically audacious gamble, but will it work in these lean economic times?, asks Aidan Dunne
ON MONDAY evening at 7pm, Damien Hirst, one of the most famous living artists, will take a huge gamble on his own celebrity when Sotheby's in London starts to auction 223 of his works. But it's not an ordinary auction. It has a title, for one thing: Beautiful Inside My Head Forever. For another thing, the artist himself is the only seller and, while there are pre-auction estimates, he claims that no reserves have been set. All the work is new, dated 2008, which seems impossible and would be, except that it the works are made by people employed by him rather than by Hirst himself. What is immediately striking when you see it is that the overwhelming majority of it is thoroughly familiar, because it consists of new versions of things he's done before, a kind of greatest-hits collection, as he described it himself. Even a new version of the shark in formaldehyde is there.
Except that a lot of it seems a bit flashier, even tackier than the originals - such as The Golden Calf, which is, predictably, preserved in a tank of formaldehyde and, yes, has hooves of gold. Gold features a great deal, adding to the air of bling. There are so many multiples of particular pieces, including his dot, butterfly and spin paintings, and skull sculptures, that the auction room looks like a department store. He's not piling them high to sell them cheap, though. The lowest estimates, for drawings, start at £15,000 (€18,800), and The Golden Calf has an estimate of £8-12 (€10-15) million.
Overall, Hirst and Sotheby's have said that they're aiming to bring in €82 million (four pieces are earmarked for specified charities), which means they're hoping to bring in much more. And, in case potential bidders get nervous when they hear there are something like 400 of his butterfly paintings in existence, none essentially different from the others, he's said that he won't do any more. Nor will he make any more spin paintings. But he hasn't yet put a limit on his amazingly lucrative dot paintings - 700 and counting.
Yet such is Hirst's stature that these figures are trifling when set against the huge appetite that has so far existed for his work. And for many buyers, the whole point of acquiring a dot painting is that it's immediately identifiable as a Hirst and hence carries a certain cachet. Nothing else matters. You don't have to be an art expert to see that, in terms of numbers, most of what's on offer is really conspicuously branded though otherwise fairly vapid products, lent aesthetic substance by a series of weightier, more conceptually involved works.
There's been a lot of comment about how novel Hirst's move into the auction rooms is, but actually it's not new at all, even for him. From the late 1990s, the auction houses, which make up a large part of the secondary art market, began to make aggressive forays into the primary market, traditionally the domain of the commercial galleries.
It has also happened in Ireland, with artists consigning pieces directly to auctions and Adams Auctioneers, for example, mounting exhibitions of new work by particular artists that is then auctioned. Sotheby's actively looked for works new to the market for its recent sales of contemporary Irish art. What's different about Hirst's initiative is the heroic scale of the enterprise.
When he sees it, or claims to see it, as a democratising exercise designed to save the hapless artist - himself - from the grasp of greedy and "snooty" dealers and gallerists, he conveniently ignores the sheer untrammelled avarice that is part and parcel of the art- auction business, and is for that matter intrinsic to having your own art factory turning out branded art products. He and his business manager, Frank Dunphy, have never seemed for a minute to be under the thumb of any gallery. In fact, Hirst is represented by two of the most dominant gallerists around, Larry Gagosian and Jay Jopling of White Cube.
Gagosian established himself as a presence in the art world in the early 1980s by galvanizing the secondary market, brokering deals between collectors and greatly upsetting the established mainstream galleries in the process. It's a good bet that a sizeable proportion of the work sold at auction will pass through the hands of the gallerists in some way or other. Jopling contradicted reports that he has a huge stock of unsold Hirsts, and said that Hirst's previous foray into auctioneering, when he sold off the contents of his Pharmacy restaurant, had the effect of broadening the market for his work. Gagosian has said that he'll be there, paddle in hand.
A LARGE PART OF HIRST'S gamble has to do with timing. When he embarked on this project over two years ago, the world economy was not in the state it is now. Presumably, he's had one eye on the inexorable decline. Yet the contemporary-art market has remained remarkably buoyant in the face of wider economic travails.
It's hard to imagine many hedge-fund managers buying with quite the enthusiasm they had just a few years back, but there are plenty of other buyers, be they Russian, Brazilian, Middle Eastern, South Korean or Chinese. Roman Abramovich has shattered auction records recently in acquiring works for his girlfriend Daria Zhukova's Moscow gallery, and surely a landmark Hirst would be a logical addition there.
Like his hero, Andy Warhol, Hirst is in the art business, and knows it is a business. He's taking a chance, but all the signs are that his latest audacious venture will pay off handsomely.
• Beautiful Inside My Head Forever is at Sotheby's in London on September 15-16