Damien HIRST – the enfant terrible in disgrace

Damien HIRST is one of the artists who most benefited from the market euphoria of the 2000s and who has logically suffered the most from its return to sanity in the 2010s. In fact the auction prices of the British enfant terriblehave never recovered: his price index is down -83% since its peak in 2008 and the volume of transactions on his work is down 91%. Here is a brief overview of his tumultuous career, which is still generating controversy.

In 1988, the unknown but clearly inspired Damien HIRST conceived and curated the Freeze show in a London warehouse, bringing together his own works plus those of his friends at Goldsmiths College. At the time, his works and those of Gary HUME, Sarah LUCAS and Fiona RAE had no particular pecuniary value, but the audacious move attracted the attention of the notorious gallery owner and advertising mogul Charles Saatchi. The latter’s mentorial and proselytising expertise, in conjunction with Jay Jopling’s similar skills (White Cube Gallery), projected Damien Hirst to the forefront of the British art scene in record time.

In 1992, year of the Young British Artists exhibition at the Saatchi Gallery, Hirst already epitomised the revolutionary spirit of a new and flamboyant movement that became known as YBA. The following year, he createdMother & Child, Divided (a cow and its calf sectioned and immersed in formalin) for the Venice Biennial, a ‘shock’ installation that earned him the 1995 Turner Prize. In 1997, his notoriety became international with the controversy surrounding the Sensation exhibition at the Royal Academy of Art in London, which attracted 300,000 visitors. His auction results at the time already suggested the emergence of a speculative dynamic: a first medicine cabinet, God (1989), tripled its high estimate when it fetched $315,000¹. At that point, Damien HIRST was at the bottom of a bidding tornado that he deftly accelerated with characteristic irreverence.

His dominance of the Contemporary art market reached a high mark in 2007 when he briefly became the most expensive living artist with Lullaby Spring, a large-scale pharmacy cabinet containing 6,136 individually painted pills. The work is one of four that evoke the four seasons while questioning the relationship between art and science – a sort of cabinet of curiosities that classifies, lists and organises colours and pills. It fetched $19.2 million at Sotheby’s, i.e. $12 million more than expected², and it is to this day his best-ever auction result³. Shortly after that record, Hirst returned to the headlines with a work entitled For The Love Of God, a human skull with 8,601 encrusted diamonds, totalling 1,106.18 carats. Highly controversial, the skull was announced as Hirst’s most expensively produced and most dearly sold work to date⁴.

At the summit of his glory Hirst decided to take his market into his own hands. With his excellent nose for business, he short-circuited his usual network of galleries, entering into direct contact with collectors via a personal auction sale of 223 works taken straight from his workshop. This historical event⁵ was organised in collusion with Sotheby’s on 15 and 16 September 2008, just hours after the fateful collapse of Lehman Brothers that precipitated a global financial meltdown. Despite the alarming economic backdrop, the sale was a huge success, generating $147 million with 45 results above the million-dollar line. It also sold his Golden Calf (in formalin) for $18.5 million⁶. By the end of that exceptional year, the world’s most media-exposed and speculated artist had generated more annual auction turnover that any of the great Modern masters like Claude Monet or Alberto GIACOMETTI…

Just months later, the global art market started to contract and the first to feel the pinch were those who had soared too high too fast. Between 2008 and 2014, Damien HIRST’s annual auction turnover collapsed and he fell from 4th place to 108th place in the global ranking⁷. At the same time, his unsold rate rose sharply from less than 15% to 35% and a number of his major works failed to sell despite price estimates lower than his results at the start of the 2000s. Meanwhile, art critics began to express a certain disaffection towards Hirst and his work as a whole, portraying him as a manipulator of the art market.

Damien HIRST’s auction career is perhaps the best example of negative rebound from excess speculation. Take for example Lullaby Spring, the work that fetched $19.2 million in 2007. Its twin sister, Lullaby Winter⁸ sold in February 2015 for $4.6 million, within its pre-sale estimated range. This suggests that Lullaby Spring would, if sold today, lose $14.6 million of its 2007 value!