Damien Hirst: The Complete Story
Damien Hirst put a tiger shark in formaldehyde, covered a skull with 8,601 diamonds, and sold 111 million pounds of new work at auction on the exact days Lehman Brothers collapsed. Whether he is the artist of his era or its symptom is still the argument, and he runs the argument too.
Death, pharmacies, butterflies, and the market itself: the Leeds kid who curated his way into history before he had made his best work.
Hirst at a glance:
Born in Bristol in 1965, raised in Leeds, rejected twice by art schools before Goldsmiths.
Curated Freeze in 1988 as a student, the show that launched the YBAs.
The 1991 shark cost 50,000 pounds of Saatchi's money, including 6,000 for the shark itself.
Sold 111 million pounds of new work at Sotheby's in September 2008, as Lehman collapsed.
His Newport Street Gallery has shown his collection free of charge since 2015.
Leeds, Goldsmiths, and Freeze
Hirst was born in Bristol on June 7, 1965, and grew up in Leeds.
At Goldsmiths in London, still a student, he organized Freeze in 1988, an exhibition of his classmates in a Docklands warehouse, hustling sponsorship and hanging the show himself.
Charles Saatchi came, bought, and the Young British Artists were born with Hirst as ringleader.
1991: the shark
With 50,000 pounds of Saatchi's money, Hirst had a four meter tiger shark caught off Australia and suspended it in formaldehyde under the title The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living.
A Thousand Years, his glass box of flies breeding and dying over a cow's head, had already impressed Francis Bacon in his last year.
The shark decayed and was replaced in 2006 after the work sold to the American collector Steven Cohen for a reported eight figures. Mother and Child (Divided), the bisected cow and calf, took the Turner Prize conversation of 1995.
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The skull and the Lehman auction
For the Love of God appeared in 2007: a platinum cast of an eighteenth century skull set with 8,601 diamonds, costed at around 14 million pounds to make and priced at 50 million. Then came the gamble nobody has repeated.
In September 2008 Hirst bypassed his galleries entirely and sold 218 fresh works straight through Sotheby's, Beautiful Inside My Head Forever, raising about 111 million pounds on September 15 and 16, while Lehman Brothers was collapsing between the two sessions.
The myth: he does not make his own work
Hirst employs assistants by the dozen and says so, which fuels the charge of fraud.
The precedent is five centuries old: Rubens, Rembrandt, and Warhol all ran workshops, and the spot paintings, more than a thousand of them, were designed as a machine-made-looking system from the start.
The fairer criticism is aimed at the market games, and Hirst tends to agree with it cheerfully, having made the market itself his most consistent medium.
Venice, Newport Street, and where to see him
Treasures from the Wreck of the Unbelievable filled two Venice museums in 2017 with fake ancient bronzes barnacled by a fictional shipwreck, at a reported production cost of some 65 million dollars, his critics' favorite folly and his gamblers' favorite proof of nerve.
In London, Tate holds key works, and his own Newport Street Gallery shows his collection free of charge. The shark lives in private hands but resurfaces on loan.
The maintenance problem nobody mentions
A shark in formaldehyde is not an object, it is a subscription. The original shark decayed because the solution was too weak, and by 2006 it had to be replaced entirely.
Hirst's studio now manages tank refills, seal inspections, and safety regulations for collectors worldwide. Owning a Hirst vitrine means employing him forever, which may be the sharpest joke in the work.
Who actually paints the spots
More than 1,000 spot paintings exist, and Hirst has said he painted only a handful himself. His assistants follow two rules: no color repeats within a painting, and the gaps equal the spot diameter.
He once said his best spot painter was Rachel Howard, and that the paintings by his own hand were worth less. The market has never known what to do with that sentence.
What happened after the Lehman auction
The 2008 sale marked the top: his auction prices fell hard for a decade, and critics wrote the obituary.
The formaldehyde works settled into museums, the 2017 Venice spectacle split opinion at colossal expense, and the market slowly recovered. No living artist has tested the machinery of art money more thoroughly.
The Damien Hirst questions that keep coming up
What is the shark artwork called? The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living, made in 1991 with Saatchi money. The original shark decayed and was replaced in 2006.
Does Damien Hirst paint his own paintings? Mostly no, by design. Assistants execute the spots and much else, a workshop model he defends by pointing at Rubens and Warhol.
What is the diamond skull? For the Love of God, 2007: 8,601 diamonds on a platinum skull cast, with a real set of eighteenth century teeth. Its 50 million pound sale was announced to a consortium that included Hirst himself.
How rich is Damien Hirst? Estimates put him among the wealthiest artists who ever lived, in the hundreds of millions of pounds, much of it from the 2008 auction gamble.
Who paints Hirst's spot paintings? Assistants, by his own account, with Rachel Howard the most celebrated. He argues the idea is the artwork and the hand is optional.
What is Newport Street Gallery? The free public gallery Hirst opened in London in 2015 to show his own collection, from Bacon to Banksy. Entry costs nothing.
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One last fact
On the two days the modern financial system cracked, September 15 and 16, 2008, collectors spent 111 million pounds on Hirst at Sotheby's. He had timed nothing and titled everything: the sale was called Beautiful Inside My Head Forever.