The parable of The Golden Calf
Edie Lush attends the record-breaking Sotheby’s sale of Damien Hirst’s artworks, and wonders whether it is all a metaphor for the recent madness of financial markets Last Monday was a historic day. Lehman filed for the biggest bankruptcy in history; the insurance giant AIG teetered on the brink; the Dow had its worst day since 9/11 — and in Mayfair an extraordinary event occurred at which seemingly few of those present had even heard of the credit crunch.
Buyers and gawkers queued outside Sotheby’s to get in for the historic evening’s sale of works by Damien Hirst. Minutes after it began, auctioneer Oliver Barker’s hammer went down on the first painting — a triptych of butterflies, manufactured diamonds and household gloss paint on canvas. Entitled ‘Heaven Can Wait’, it went for £850,000; a good start, against an estimate of £300,000-500,000.
The event continued with a shark in formaldehyde entitled ‘The Kingdom’ selling above the estimated £4-6 million for £8.5 million (that’s £9.6 million including the buyer’s premium, which is Sotheby’s fee). Much-discussed Lot 13, ‘The Golden Calf’, sold towards the low end of its estimated range at only £9.2 million. Before he brought down the hammer, Barker asked the audience, ‘Are we going on? It is “The Golden Calf”...’ But if buyers balked at spending more on a pickled calf with 18-carat gold horns and hooves, the work still set a Hirst record and helped create a new all-time high for an auction of a single artist’s work. The sale that night of 56 works by Hirst raised £70.5 million. Picasso set the previous record for a single-artist auction in 1993. That sale, of 88 lots, totalled £11.3 million. In all, Hirst’s auction raised ten times what Picasso made — a second day of auctions having brought the total to £111 million.
That comparison will provokes Hirst’s detractors to question, for the umpteenth time, the intrinsic worth of his work. But boy, is he a sought-after commodity. Hedge-fund types in the audience must have been toying with metaphors about Hirst works as hot-selling derivatives, disconnected from fundamental value, while the dichotomy between the carnage on Wall Street and the euphoria on Bond Street wasn’t lost on the rest of the crowd.
If the outcome was historic, the decision to hold the auction in the first place was far from easy. By bypassing dealers, Hirst risked offending the very people who fostered his career by helping to spread his work among the world’s collectors and museums. Hirst himself admitted he’d had nightmares that the galleries would convince no one to bid.
Had it been a slow night on eBay, his fears might have been realised. But this was a carefully planned spectacle, marketed to the world’s richest collectors. Hirst and Sotheby’s made presentations in New Delhi, Kiev, the Hamptons and Aspen as well as — here’s a sign of the times — marketing the collection on YouTube. He invited collectors from Ukraine and Russia to private views. The fact that last year Qatar’s ruling Al-Thani family bought Hirst’s ‘Lullaby Spring’ (painted pills displayed in a steel and glass cabinet) for £9.7 million helped convince the artist that his market lay beyond traditional Western buyers. One dealer said of Monday’s bidders: ‘These are the only people who don’t already have a Damien Hirst. The rest of the world already has one.’ That snide remark is revealing. The artcollecting West may have had its fill of Hirst, but the global market for contemporary art has changed considerably in the last few years. Buyers have arrived from China, the former Soviet republics, the Middle East and India. Other recent contemporary arts sales have gone to ‘new’ money — last year, Peter Doig’s ‘White Canoe’ was bought by the Georgian mining magnate Boris Ivanishvili for £5.7 million, and Jeff Koons’s ‘Hanging Heart’ went under the hammer to Victor Pinchuk, Ukraine’s second richest man. Both Sotheby’s and Christie’s have been expanding their operations in the Gulf, Russia and China, offering art advice, finance, shipping and insurance. Sotheby’s bet is that buyers from these new frontiers are not affected by the credit crunch. According to the Art Daily newspaper, 35 per cent of buyers at the first night of the Hirst sale were new to the Contemporary Art department and 18 per cent were new to Sotheby’s altogether. Of the bidders new to Sotheby’s, a quarter came from so-called ‘new’ markets.
And while Sotheby’s may have stepped on dealers’ toes in the Hirst sale, it isn’t the first incursion. In 2006, Sotheby’s bought one of Europe’s most prestigious old masters dealers, Noortman Master Paintings. Christie’s followed suit in 2007, buying the contemporary art dealer Haunch of Venison. The Noortman deal allowed Sotheby’s to deal for the first time in the Maastricht art fair. Haunch of Venison helped Christie’s owner François Pinault to be named by ArtReview magazine as ‘the most powerful person in contemporary art’.
The Sotheby–Hirst relationship initially blossomed in 2004 when Sotheby’s auctioned the contents of Pharmacy, a Notting Hill restaurant part-owned by Hirst. After the restaurant closed in 2003, Sotheby’s and Hirst collaborated to sell over 150 lots. The sale was expected to raise £3 million — but when the hammer came down on the final lot, £11.1 million had been raised.
So if art dealers not bought by auction houses have much to be angry about, why didn’t they shun Hirst’s latest Sotheby’s venture? Ben Brown of Ben Brown Fine Arts says, ‘No one wanted it to flop — falling contemporary art prices aren’t good for anyone.’ Brown’s statement is backed up by the fact that Hirst’s London dealer Jay Jopling and a team from his New York dealer Larry Gagosian sat and bid throughout the auction. As to whether it will become common practice to bypass dealers, Brown is doubtful. ‘Very few artists have the brand name, the sheer output and the style to go straight to auction.’ But Brown is clear that the sale succeeded because of Sotheby’s global reach. Auctioneer Barker was flanked by dozens of people manning telephones and reaching buyers not only in Sotheby’s VIP rooms in the building but across the world. Some American buyers who were expected to bid pulled out because of the financial turmoil, but those who took their places clearly weren’t concerned: perhaps a Hirst is now seen as the ultimate hedge.
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