Dali House

What can I moan about Damien Hirst that hasn’t already been moaned elsewhere? You don’t see a lot of contemporary art at Dali House, and he’s one of the reasons why.

But the folks at Sotheby’s have given me a nudge about their big, two-day “Damien Hirst — Beautiful Inside My Head Forever Evening Sale” in London in September, and I just had to have a look at the catalogue. Well, you do, don’t you, when something ghastly comes along?

There’s nothing ghastly about pickled fish, of course. It’s the prices people pay for them that are horrific.

The auction house says Hirst has come up with a batch of “new” stuff — 223 lots in all that are collectively expected to generated £65 million-plus.

The picture up top shows a construction called “The Kingdom”, and I’ve tossed Damien in with the shark, just for fun, alright? Tiger shark, glass, steel, silicone and formaldehyde solution with steel plinth. It was created this year.

Didn’t this used to be called “The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living”? Yes, it was, but this is a fresh specimen, and the asking price is between £4 million and £6 million. Talk about catch of the day.

He’s capable of a decent picture, like “Transience Painting 2″, shown here, a relative steal at £500,000, but it’s an anomaly in his world.

The dead sharks, zebra, dove, sheep and calf are all back for the autumn sale, the flies stuck to resin, the butterfly wings glazed with diamonds, the packets of medicine and bottles of pills, the spins, the spots and the, uh, unicorn.

I suppose we should just look the other way because Hirst is giving a fair chunk of the proceeds to charity — kids and musicians in need and Survival International, plus a bit for Bill and Melinda Gates’ AIDS concern — but certainly not all the money.

Hirst, says Whitecube.com, “has sought to challenge the boundaries between art, science and popular culture”. I think the bloke after whom this blog is named was doing that around the time Damien was born, and Don Salvador was already standing on the shoulders of scientifically minded giants of art.

And I believe we’ve seen plenty of curiosity cabinets from the 17th and 18th centuries. Wonderful things. You can put one together yourself from odds and ends. Or you could pay Damien Hirst £3.5 million for the zoologist’s special of the day pictured below, “Here Today, Gone Tomorrow”: glass, stainless steel, fish, fish skeletons, acrylic, MDF, paint and formaldehyde solution.

The title is apt for Hirst, but far too obvious to be a decent joke.

October 11, 2008: I really did have to add this.

Just as Lehman Brothers was going belly up and the US Congress and Senate were frothing over the credit crisis, Damien Hirst’s “Beautiful Inside My Head Forever” sale at Sotheby’s London on September 15 and 16 was raking in $200,752,179 for 218. Somehow, even with, five lots went unsold. The prices averaged out to $920,882.

Sotheby’s subsequent Art Market Review credited the auctioneer’s own marketing blitz for making the auction “more than a sale of artwork”.

“It became an international cultural event of significant proportions. Hirst is one of only a handful of artists with global name-recognition — and possibly the only one alive today. The artist’s status as a living symbol of contemporary art set up a rare opportunity for collectors (and non-collectors) from around the world to participate in a unique event …

“One of Damien Hirst’s central rationales for selling new work through an auction instead of through the artist’s network of dealers was his often-repeated desire to ‘democratise’ his market,” the review continued. As a result, as far as the auction house could determine, 91% of the buyers were acquiring their first work of art by Hirst, and they accounted for 69% of the sale’s total value.

“Sotheby’s reports that bidders and buyers at the sale were ‘primarily Russian, Indian, French, UK and US collectors’.”

This was, the review concludes, “a unique event. Hirst is the rare personality who would take the risks involved. Both the volume of art on offer and the level of media interest necessary to propel the sale, suggest that it is an event that cannot easily be repeated.”