Word: spinnings
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...hand - it would mean that Hirst has run into that age-old problem of factory production: excess inventory. A few weeks ago Bloomberg.com quoted Robert Sandelson, a London gallerist who has dealt in Hirst, about the "pressure" that overproduction has placed on the market for spot and spin paintings. According to Bloomberg, one of those, Hydrocodone, sold at Christie's in London last year for $818,000, but resold this year at Sotheby's in New York for only...
...people work on the manufacturing end, but scores of assistants execute his product-lines-on-canvas, which are hugely profitable but for the most part aesthetically negligible. Those include hundreds of "spot paintings," each a multicolored grid of little circles and named after a pharmaceutical product; "spin paintings" made by pouring paint onto a whirling disk; and "butterfly paintings" made by embedding dead butterflies in pigment and resin, sometimes in elaborate stained-glass-window formations, sometimes just attached here and there on the canvas. At Sotheby's the spin paintings are expected to fetch as much as $720,000 each...
...another milestone in his financial victory march. But it may also be a terminus, a house-cleaning by a man overtaken by his own success. Hirst has been thinking out loud lately about finding some new directions. For one thing, he says he's going to quit doing the spin and butterfly paintings, and slow down the production of animals in vitrines. He's said this before, but this time he seems to mean it. In June he turned 43 - an age, he says, when "you start thinking you're going to need something else. Something more personal and quieter...
...Spin Cycle Complete Over the summer the Sotheby's sale - which has one of those wonderfully daft Hirst titles, "Beautiful Inside My Head Forever" - got the kind of presale treatment that Boeing and Airbus give the rollout of a new jetliner. In August a selection of the material was shipped for viewing to the Hamptons, the weekend retreat for New York millionaires. It 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...
...This may be another reason, apart from the impulse to explore new avenues, why Hirst has decided to throttle back production of the spin and butterfly paintings. The Sotheby's sale is also a canny way of getting his name out to new 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...