News from the art world
Hirst’s Government handouts
By some estimates, Damien Hirst is “the world’s richest artist”, said Richard Eden in the Daily Mail. He has an estimated fortune of around £300m, owns a 14-bedroom house in Regent’s Park, and has been known to give seats on private jets to his pet bulldog. “None of that, however, deterred him from turning to the hard-pressed taxpayer during the pandemic.” According to the accounts for his company, Science (UK), it claimed £1.31m in furlough payments from the Covid job-retention scheme in 2020 – a year in which it turned over a total of £18.2m. The business also received a £15m business-interruption loan from the Government. Nevertheless, said Anny Shaw in The Art Newspaper, Hirst laid off 63 studio employees in October 2020, after a planned retrospective of his work in China was cancelled. The cancellation forced him “to remodel his business, pausing the production of new works and concentrating on the sale of existing pieces”. He fired a third of his workforce, mostly based in Dudbridge, Gloucestershire.
Newly discovered tombs in Egypt
Archaeologists in Egypt have discovered five previously unidentified tombs that make up part of the vast pharaonic necropolis complex at Saqqara, just outside Cairo, says Deutsche Welle. The tombs are thought to have housed “senior officials from the Old Kingdom and First Intermediate period of ancient Egypt”, and may have been built as long ago as 2700 BC. Within the spaces, the archaeologists unearthed a wealth of treasures. The biggest tomb consists of a deep burial shaft leading to a chamber whose walls are decorated with funerary scenes, and which contains a limestone sarcophagus. Another was the tomb of a priest of Hathor, the goddess of fertility and love. “All of those five tombs are well painted, well decorated,” said Mostafa Waziri of Egypt’s Supreme Council of Antiquities. It is hoped that the discovery, along with the opening of a new museum at Giza, will help to revive tourism to the North African country, which has suffered because of political turmoil since 2011 and the coronavirus.