Word: artistic
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...also went to New Delhi, to wink at India's increasingly powerful collectors. In June Hirst flew to Kiev to attend a Paul McCartney concert and a party hosted by Victor Pinchuk, a Ukrainian steel billionaire who owns seven Hirsts and a private art museum. A month later the artist gave a private tour of some of the Sotheby's work to Daria Zhukova, a young, London-based art impresario. Her boyfriend is Roman Abramovich, the Russian owner of Chelsea Football Club, who this year alone was widely presumed to be the buyer of a $33.6 million Lucian Freud that...
...more comfortable in an auction house - where anyone with cash can flex their muscles - than in top galleries, where dealers sometimes try to place works only with important collectors who might lend or give them to major museums. It's all part of any dealer's service to the artist's long-term reputation, but it can have the effect of discouraging less prominent customers. This is how Hirst sees it too. "I hate the way when you walk into a gallery and say you want to buy a Damien Hirst they say: 'Who are you?' I much prefer...
...have the thing manufactured at a stratospheric level of crass luxury - a platinum skull layered with 8,601 diamonds - then to offer the poisoned apple to the world's billionaires for $100 million. At that price level it would not only be the most expensive work by a living artist, but a punch line to Hirst's conceptualist joke about the madness of the overheated art market. Just like The Golden Calf, the diamond skull would go into the world to prove its own argument about false values...
...last couple of years Hirst has also been painting again - actually painting, as in the kind of pictures an artist produces with his own hand, not through assistants - and always with a sense of Bacon looking over his shoulder. If he continues to go this route it's a big risk. He's given no evidence up to now that he knows what to do with a brush, and there are plenty of people waiting for him to fall on his face...
Likewise, SellaBand.com connects music lovers with unsigned artists looking to record albums. It's a way to bypass the labels; groupies can now fill that role. Musicians have profiles with bios and songs, and as soon as they sell 5,000 shares, at $10 a pop, it's time to head to the recording studio. In two years, more than 30,000 people have ponied up more than $2.5 million, and 25 musicians have cut or are cutting albums. So far, the average return on each $10 investment is about $2.50 from CD sales and ads. The money gets split...