Word: hirst
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...Color of Money Hirst never met his biological father. He was raised mostly by his mother, Mary Brennan, who lives next door to his home in Devon. A stepfather departed when he was 12. As a boy, Hirst liked to draw, and eventually he was accepted by Goldsmiths College at the University of London. It was as a second-year student that he did the thing that first...
...Freeze" was an exhibition of work by Hirst and 15 fellow students that he organized in 1988 in a rented warehouse in the London docklands. He persuaded figures of consequence in the British museum world to take a look, and over the next few years whipped up a storm of coverage from a British media that, in those days, rarely paid much attention to new art, except to stick out its tongue. "I grew up in a background of people who weren't into art," he recalls. "They'd say: 'If you can do a drawing that looks like...
...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...
...early 1990s Saatchi was one of Hirst's biggest collectors and promoters. It was Saatchi who commissioned that pickled shark, which he sold 13 years later to American hedge-fund manager Steven Cohen for a reported $12 million. It was Saatchi who bundled Hirst together with other British artists he collected, like Sarah Lucas and Marc Quinn, to create the media phenomenon called Young British Artists. What they had in common other than age was work that was abrasive, unconventional and a little unappetizing - Lucas' first solo exhibition was called "Penis Nailed to a Board"; Quinn produced a self-portrait...
...Hirst was the de facto leader of the pack and a bad boy at the center of every party. He drank heavily and knew all about the business end of a cocaine straw. A turning point came when he met Frank Dunphy, his genial but very shrewd business manager and empire builder. Dunphy is a 70-year-old Irishman who once handled the books for acrobats, jugglers and "exotic" dancers. In the mid-'90s he agreed to help Hirst straighten out a tax problem. Hirst says Dunphy promised to make him money. "I said, 'You're an accountant - you mean...