Word: artists
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...When you ask Hirst about his early influences, it's not an artist he brings up first. It's Charles Saatchi, a former ad tycoon and collector who established a gallery in 1985 to show his own collection. The sheer size of the place made Hirst think big. "I had never seen a gallery of that scale," he says. "Britain was always small. Then Saatchi came and put things on a big f___ing American scale. So I just started making work like that. It didn't matter that I didn't know where...
...meant it. In time, Dunphy would take all of the wayward boy's business affairs in hand, not least renegotiating Hirst's split with dealers. Dunphy says Hirst's galleries now accept an arrangement that gives the artist as much as 70% of the sale price, instead of the standard 50%. But even with that advantageous formula, an auction in which Hirst reaps almost all the profits, while merely covering some sundry costs, was too much to resist. He'll still work with dealers, says Dunphy. But "Damien's far enough up the greasy pole...
...seen a phenomenal increase in auction prices for contemporary art. Many of the buyers come from Russia, Asia and the Middle East, where a new class of billionaire collectors has emerged. It was none other than the royal family of Qatar that briefly made Hirst the most expensive living artist at auction last year by paying $19.2 million for Lullaby Spring, one of his medicine-cabinet pieces...
...Artists, however, don't ordinarily get a dime from auction sales of their work. The money goes to the sellers and the auction house. But where is the rule that an artist can't sell his own work at auction? And it was always likely that Hirst would be the first artist to do that. He has the production capacity to supply a big sale, the name recognition, and a relationship with Sotheby's that began four years ago with a London auction of just about everything that wasn't nailed to the floor at Pharmacy, a celebrity-magnet restaurant...
...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...