Word: hirst
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...more than a decade Damien Hirst has been one of the richest and most famous artists in the world. All the same, when you sit down with him, he still seems surprised by it. "I grew up with quite an impoverished background," he says. "I didn't see any possibility that I would ever get paid for doing anything I enjoyed." Hirst tells me this one rainy afternoon in July at one of his many studios. This one is in Stroud, a rural town in Gloucestershire, about two hours' drive west of London. When he says this I think...
...bull is called The Golden Calf and it's headed to market at Sotheby's in London, where it will be the star of a much hyped two-day sale of 223 works by Hirst that begins on Sept. 15. This will be the first time any auction house has sold a quantity of work fresh out of an artist's studio. As auction prices for contemporary art have rocketed ever higher, galleries have been dreading this very possibility: that a famous artist would bypass his dealers - who usually get a cut of roughly half of a work's sale...
...white bullock preserved in a tank of formaldehyde that's mounted on a high marble plinth. His hooves and horns are 18-carat gold. His head is crowned by a gold Egyptian solar disk. Seen head-on, he's a false idol whose headgear is simultaneously silly and mesmerizing. (Hirst is assuming his buyers know the Bible story about worshipping a false god, just like the one they are about to worship.) But the beast is best seen in profile, the view that leaves you to reconcile as best you can his hieratic gravity with the laugh-out-loud abundance...
...severed arm on the floor--captured "the moment when self-consciousness dawns," Angus Fairhurst once explained. One of the so-called Young British Artists who debuted in the 1990s, Fairhurst worked in media ranging from photography to painting and collaborated with his more confrontational art-school classmates Damien Hirst and Sarah Lucas--most notably in the landmark 2004 Tate Britain show "In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida." He took his own life...
...goes" then skill, craft, sensuous handling, emotions, the artist's personal expression and artistic originality are all optional - "art" can be any object untransformed, just presented in a gallery and given a title. Andy Warhol ran with this idea in the 1960s, and so do Jeff Koons and Damien Hirst today. Art students are in awe of it. It was Duchamp who invented this concept, and his friends Ray and Picabia remained fascinated by it all their lives, even if they didn't wholly practice it; Ray used a lot of different materials, from photography to collage, and Picabia...