Art of being a moaning millionaire
It is quite a while since we last heard from Damien Hirst. Like su Pollard, Martin Amis, Jive Bunny and Norman Lamont, he is a figure from a bygone age.
But yesterday he popped up in one of my favourite magazines, the idler, to talk about life, art and money.
He has long been known for i) his self-pity, ii) his talent for publicity and iii) his ability to get others to do the donkey-work. He has now successfully combined all three by going into print to complain about how his employees made his life a misery.
‘You start by thinking you’ll get one assistant and before you know it, you’ve got biographers, fireeaters, f***ing minstrels and lyre players all wandering around’, he told his interviewer. ‘they’re saying they are not being paid enough and they all need assistants... Before you know it, suddenly you’ve got an overdraft when before you had loads of cash.’
Even in his youth, Hirst was a master of delegation. Nearly 30 years ago, he paid a fisherman £6,000 to catch and kill a shark off the coast of Queensland in Australia. He then employed someone to stuff the shark, another person to make a container for it, and someone else to place it in the container.
At this point, Hirst made his sole contribution to the project. Remembering the arty title he had once scribbled on the top of a school essay, he named the completed work ‘the Physical impossibility of Death in the Mind of someone Living’. the art world swooned. Yes, they thought, this is surely a young man with something to say!
in fact, it was very much the sort of wordy, lah-di-dah title Hirst’s near-contemporary Adrian Mole, aged 13 3/4, might have penned in his desperation to impress his beloved Pandora with his intellectual heft. it meant nothing, but it did the trick: the dead shark was instantly snapped up by the famous advertising mogul Charles saatchi, who, through a strange coincidence, had also grown wealthy by coining a schoolboyish slogan (‘Labour isn’t Working’).
in 2004, saatchi sold the dead shark to a hedge fund billionaire for roughly $8 million. By now, Hirst had begun employing a small army of servants working for barely more than the minimum wage to mass-produce paintings of coloured spots and splashes which he then sold for a small fortune.
Four years later he put 223 new works up for auction at sotheby’s, and left the auction £111 million richer. Across the world, boardrooms that had once been decorated with paintings of their moustachioed Victorian founders were now home to spitty-spotty works by Damien Hirst.
Around this time, his manager would tell Damien Hirst: ‘You’ve had another double rollover lottery weekend.’ By this, he meant that Hirst had made £30-£40 million between Friday and Monday.
in 2014, he spent a small proportion of his earnings on a £34 million house overlooking Regent’s Park that John Nash had built in 1811 for the future King George iV.
Hirst diversified into everything from restaurants to wallpaper. At his 2012 retrospective at tate Modern, the museum store was selling limited-edition plastic skulls painted in household gloss for £36,800. the skull on which they were based, pretentiously titled ‘For the Love of God’ and encrusted with 8,601 diamonds, was offered for sale at £50 million, though it is not known if they ever found someone rich and foolish enough to pay that price.
You might have thought that all this earning and spending would have done something to dampen Hirst’s self-pity. Not a bit of it. in the idler, Hirst grumbles that his bankers and accountants ‘only love you because they’re taking your money’.
Well, it’s taken a long time for that particular penny to drop! Did he really think they loved him for his charm, his wit, his wisdom, or — heaven forbid! — his art?
in fact, he seems peculiarly tongue-tied whenever it comes to the subject of art. ‘What is art?’ his biographer, Gordon Burn, asked him on one occasion. ‘it’s a f***ing poor excuse for life, innit, eh?’ he replied. But his inarticulacy has, you will be pleased to learn, done nothing to dent his opinion of himself. ‘it’s like i’m a Bonnard, a turner, a Matisse’, he told Burn. or a Jive Bunny, he failed to add.