Is Damien Hirst sunk?
Prices for his ‘art’ are plummeting. His Bond Street shop’s shut. He’s ditched a grand plan to build a town — and his new £50m shipwreck exhibition is being ridiculed. So...
The astonishing array of ancient statues and artefacts was supposedly lost when a huge ship sank in the Indian Ocean, 2,000 years ago. This priceless cargo would still be gathering barnacles if Damien hirst hadn’t dispatched divers to salvage it, at great personal cost, then spent a decade painstakingly restoring it for public display.
Well, that’s the story the conart master (who amassed his reputed £215million fortune by persuading oligarchs and sheiks to pay vastly inflated sums for his pickled sharks and rotting cows) has concocted to promote his comeback exhibition, Treasures From The Wreck Of The Unbelievable.
But it is all complete tosh — a myth designed to ramp up the hype surrounding the lavish show, which is said to have cost him £50 million to create and opened in Venice yesterday, and doubtless to up the asking price for its 190 pieces when they eventually go on sale.
Among the highbrow art critics at last week’s preview, the Guardian’s expert was one of the few who seemed impressed. Gazing at a coralencrusted nymph, he told me the exhibition marked ‘an extraordinary return to form’ for the fallen wunderkind of the Britart movement.
But his counterpart on the Daily Telegraph lambasted the phoney display from the deep. It was ‘kitsch masquerading as high art...a spectacularly bloated folly’, he wrote, venturing it might finally scupper hirst’s career.
And The Times’s Rachel CampbellJohnston said the ‘absurd’ show ‘should be dumped at the bottom of the sea’.
As for this untrained observer, I felt like I had been trapped in a huge ornamental fishtank. either that, or I had wandered on to the set of The Little Mermaid.
But it was an Xrated version, with a doubleG cupped woman wrestling a hydra who is, on close inspection, not a naked egyptian goddess but that very modern model, Katie Price, and a monstrously endowed, 60ft tall demon scratching his posterior. hirst evidently thinks it all a hoot, but I found room after room of statues indulging his lewd, middleaged laddish humour rather juvenile.
AnD I suspect many punters who will pay £20 until December to gawp at colossal, fossil-studded nymphs and leviathans, corroded weaponry and bouldersized ‘gold nuggets’ (which look suspiciously like scrunchedup chocolate wrappers) might share my misgivings.
hirst’s exhibition features huge photos and a video of the ‘salvage operation’. he even invited a favoured journalist to witness a dive off the coast of Zanzibar — patently choreographed — in which sculptures of a 9ft tall drummer and a bronze lion appeared to be rescued.
Despite all this, it would take a very gullible visitor to fall for his fishy yarn. It’s quickly apparent the spectacle is hirst’s idea of a cosmic joke. Unless, that is, ancient sculptors created the first images of Mickey Mouse and Goofy, and weaponry makers embossed their swords with ‘Sea World’.
The truth behind what is surely hirst’s most audacious moneyspinning confidence trick is that many of the items in his ‘ancient treasure trove’ were manufactured by technicians in his production factory — in Gloucestershire.
As for the bronze works, they were cast in the nearby Pangolin editions foundry run by Rungwe Kingdon and his wife Claude Koenig, who have fashioned many of hirst’s pieces down the years.
Some of these items were then submerged in seawater until the metal oxidised and turned green and they gathered layers of coral.
‘It was a secret project going back years — maybe as many as ten,’ one of hirst’s staff told me last week. ‘They made these objects, put them in the sea, and then retrieved them.’ She didn’t know where they were sunk. But given hirst’s ties to north Devon — he has business interests in Ilfracombe, and his estranged partner Maia norman (mother of his three sons) lives in nearby Combe Martin —there’s a suspicion some were bathed in the briny off the SouthWest coast.
This isn’t to accuse hirst of dishonesty, for he has stopped short of claiming the display is genuine — urging us to suspend our scepticism and indulge his fantasy. Or as he says: ‘Myth or fact — whatever you want to believe.’
But why has the 51yearold artist — who looked decidedly edgy last week as he arrived to oversee the final touches to the exhibition — gone to such elaborate lengths to create his grand illusion?
Why has he invested the best part of a decade — and a chunk of his fortune — to stage the biggest art show in recent memory, in collaboration with his friend, Christie’s owner Francois Pinault, who has given over both his cavernous canalside galleries, the Palazzo Grassi and Punta della Dogana, to Treasures From The Wreck?
It is certainly a bold gamble, for there is no bigger stage from which an artist can fall. Oliver Barker, chairman of Sotheby’s europe, likens it to ‘elvis coming back to play Las Vegas’. Yet art experts agree it is a calculated gamble — one hirst knows he must take if he is to restore his reputation for outrageous and shocking innovation. A reputation tarnished by a series of scalding reviews, most recently for his woefully inept painting, and his ‘Schizophrenogensis’ exhibition (which was an unoriginal reprise of his famous medical cabinets filled with pills and syringes).
And there is the financial imperative, always important to hirst, who as one writer said, has ‘a touch of the Arfur Daley about him’, and has confessed his obsession with material wealth.
no one is suggesting hirst is on his uppers — he’s the world’s wealthiest artist and has interests in a string of commercial enterprises operating under the secretive umbrella of his Jerseybased holding company, Science Ltd.
The December 2015 records for one of these companies, which produces his artwork and manages his business affairs, reveal it paid its highestearning director — presumably hirst — £900,000 in payments, £180,000 more than in the previous year. he also has fabulous homes in Mexico and
Thailand, plus several in Britain.
They including a £34 million, Grade I-listed mansion overlooking the boating lake in London’s Regent’s Park (where he recently angered heritage watchdog Historic England with his extension plans) and a 14th-century Gloucestershire manor house, where he indulges his bizarre fixation with death.
Its floors are made from gravestones, skeletons decorate the wood panelling and every book on the shelves has ‘death’ in its title.
Hirst’s main residence is a relatively modest house in South-West London, which he shares with his sons Connor, 21, Cassius, 16, and Cyrus, ten. Presumably his latest model girlfriend, 26-year-old Katie Keight, still lives with him, too, though the pair haven’t been sighted together since January.
Perhaps middle-aged Hirst is a tad tame these days. The hellraiser, whose favourite pranks included cutting a hole in his trouser pocket and tricking friends into touching his genitalia, kicked drink and drugs nine years ago.
He now lives healthily, practising yoga, swimming in his indoor pool and working out in his gym.
So, no, he isn’t short of a million or two. That said, given his troubled background (the product of a brief holiday romance, he was raised on a Leeds estate and got in trouble for shoplifting), he may be very sensitive to the prospect of his wealth being reduced.
For one thing, his selling power has fallen considerably since its peak in 2008, when he pulled his great entrepreneurial masterstroke, bypassing galleries to auction a large number of works at Sotheby’s. It netted him £110 million, on the very day Lehman Brothers bank fell victim to the credit crunch. That year, one of his trademark spin-paintings, a 7ft-square canvas with a skull in the centre, sold for £668,450. Last month, when it was resold, it fetched £449,000.
There are any number of similar examples to indicate his work has depreciated in value — not least because he has saturated the market with mass-produced copies by his 150-strong staff. At the last count, there were 6,000 Damien Hirst paintings and sculptures, and 2,000 drawings in circulation.
Meanwhile, Hirst’s prestigious gallery at 36 New Bond Street — selling everything from £46,000 tiles ‘adorned’ with dead butterflies to £250 rolls of wallpaper decorated with his familiar coloured spots — has closed.
It is not known why he took this decision, but rents have risen steeply in that exclusive area.
His direct sales-point is now in a much less salubrious former workshop in Vauxhall, London, which he has converted into a gallery, restaurant, cocktail bar and warehouse. When a Mail reporter visited the gallery last week, it was empty except for the attendants.
Hirst’s grandiose plans to diversify into the home-building business have also hit the buffers.
Through his property company, Resign, he had hoped to revolutionise the living standards of ordinary folk in Ilfracombe by building 750 affordable, high-spec houses powered by solar panels and concealed wind turbines. But after spending £2million on land, planning fees and environmental consultants, he pulled out last year because none of the nine construction firms he approached to work with him believed the scheme could turn a profit.
‘Damien put his money where his mouth is. He wanted to build the very best homes for young workers and families,’ says a North Devon Council source. ‘But basically, the response from builders was: “Stick to the posh art, we’ll do the houses.”’
Resign has now struck a deal with property developer Intox to take over the scheme, so at least Hirst seems likely to claw back a big chunk of his investment.
For a temperamental artist, however, the failure of this philanthropic venture has doubtless come as yet another chastening and stressful experience.
All this may help to explain Hirst’s apparent determination to cash in on the publicity surrounding the Venice exhibition. Not long ago, I understand, he sent sales representatives to the Italian city, seeking orders for his recently released work. (According to a well-informed source, they found business dismally ‘slow’).
Despite the insistence of exhibition organisers that it is an artistic project, not a commercial venture, and that there are no current plans to sell the 190 pieces when it closes — it might also explain why efforts are quietly under way to find buyers. Wealthy collectors have apparently been wooed by reps with iPads showing images of the pieces that might go on offer.
Prices are said to start at £400,000 for smaller pieces, rising to £4 million for larger and more elaborate sculptures.
To leading curator Julian Spalding, who has run several major British galleries, it sounds depressingly familiar — and tacky.
‘Hirst began as a con-artist and is ending as a mythmaker, cooking up a phoney past to disguise the fact he has no future,’ he told me. ‘His “treasures” really are unbelievable — a spoof stunt to get people talking about him again.
‘[Artists such as] Rembrandt had something profound and lasting to say. If you had a Rembrandt on your wall, you want to keep on looking at it. Hirst’s work is just an empty marketing ploy, and the longer it stays on your wall, the more money you will lose.’
David Lee, editor of the respected art magazine, The Jackdaw, agrees: ‘If this is the best he can do, Hirst is in trouble. His items look strangely feeble to me. The kind of thing that would appear in a children’s film.
‘It is not even an original idea. There is an underwater sculpture museum in Cancun, Mexico. It will be interesting to see whether he can inject some longevity into his failing career with this exhibition, but I doubt it.’
Wounding words. But Damien Hirst won’t care one iota.
The smoke and mirrors are working their magic. He is setting the art world abuzz again.
And soon, tycoons with little taste and fathomless bank accounts will doubtless start bidding ludicrous sums for his factory-made treasures from the deep.
‘Hirst’s treasures really are just a spoof stunt’ ‘If this is the best he can do, then he is in trouble’