Damien Hirst: The Complete Story
Damien Hirst is the richest and most provocative British artist of his generation. He put a real shark in a tank of formaldehyde, covered a human skull in diamonds, and sold a whole show straight at auction on the day the banks crashed.
Death and money are his two great subjects, and he has made a fortune on both.
His art keeps asking what a thing is worth, while setting the price as high as he can.
Born: Bristol, England, 1965
Known for: the formaldehyde shark, spot paintings, the diamond skull
Active: England, leading figure of the Young British Artists
The stories behind the stories
Three that take a single painting apart, properly:
The secret behind Hopper Soir Bleu, the clown picture that went wrong
Titian, Sacred and Profane Love, which of the two women is which
Twelve famous portraits and the real people, the faces behind the paintings
The shark that made his name
In 1991 Hirst suspended a real tiger shark in a glass tank of formaldehyde and gave it a title about death. It became the defining image of the Young British Artists and modern shock art.
It is a memento mori for the modern age, forcing you to look at death while a dead thing floats in front of you. See what is memento mori.
Death as the great subject
Almost everything Hirst makes circles back to mortality. He has displayed animals cut in sections, rooms full of live butterflies, and cabinets of pills standing in for our faith in medicine.
His most extreme object is For the Love of God, a real human skull cast in platinum and set with more than eight thousand diamonds. See what is vanitas.
The art that runs like a business
Hirst works at industrial scale. His famous spot paintings, grids of coloured dots, are mostly made by assistants to his design, and he has been frank that he barely paints them himself.
To admirers this is the logical end of Andy Warhol's factory. To critics it is branding pretending to be art. Hirst has never seemed to mind which side wins.
The auction that beat the dealers
In 2008 Hirst did something almost no living artist had dared. He sold an entire show of new work, called Beautiful Inside My Head Forever, directly through a Sotheby's auction, cutting out his own galleries.
It raised over 100 million pounds. By chance the sale opened on the very day the bank Lehman Brothers collapsed, making it a strange monument to the end of an era of easy money.
The shipwreck that never was
In 2017 Hirst staged his most extravagant gamble, Treasures from the Wreck of the Unbelievable, across two museums in Venice. It presented hundreds of sculptures as treasure salvaged from an ancient shipwreck, complete with fake coral and underwater films.
It was entirely invented, and reportedly cost him tens of millions of his own money. Critics split violently between calling it a masterpiece and a folly, which is roughly where Hirst likes to leave them.
Damien Hirst, briefly answered
What is Damien Hirst known for?
The formaldehyde shark, spot paintings, and the diamond covered skull For the Love of God.
What is the shark piece?
A real shark preserved in formaldehyde, his best known work about death.
Does he make his own paintings?
Many, like the spot paintings, are made by assistants to his design.
Is he still working?
Yes, he remains one of the most prominent and wealthy living artists.
Why the shark still circles
Hirst made death into a luxury product and dared the art world to pay for it. It did. Whether that makes him a serious artist or the ultimate salesman is the question he has built his whole career on never quite answering.
One last detail. The original shark slowly rotted in its tank and had to be replaced with a fresh one years later. The work about the impossibility of escaping death could not even keep its own body intact.