Word: auctioner
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...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...
...Within the art world, the announcement of Hirst's Sotheby's sale did not really come as a surprise. The last few years have 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...
...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 set an auction record for the work of a living artist, and an $86.3 million Francis Bacon that set a record for postwar...
...buyers. "There's our global reach," says Cheyenne Westphal, Sotheby's European chairman of contemporary art. "We're everywhere, and we act as a magnet for all the new people coming into the market." And a lot of those people might be 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...