Page 20 Daily Mail, Tuesday, March 3, 2020
Art of being
a moaning
millionaire
I
t is quite a while since
w e l a s t h e a r d f r o m
Damien Hirst. Like su
Pollard, Martin Amis,
Jive Bunny and Norman
Lamont, he is a figure from
a bygone age.
But yesterday he popped up in
one of my favourite magazines,
the idler, to talk about life, art
and money.
He has long been known for i) his
self-pity, ii) his talent for publicity
and iii) his ability to get others to
do the donkey-work. He has now
successfully combined all three by
going into print to complain about
how his employees made his life
a misery.
‘You start by thinking you’ll get
one assistant and before you know
it, you’ve got biographers, fire-
eaters, f***ing minstrels and lyre
players all wan-
dering around’,
he told his inter-
viewer. ‘they’re
saying they are
not being paid
enough and they
all need assist-
ants... Before you
know it, suddenly
y o u’ v e g o t a n(^) overdraft when
before you had
loads of cash.’
E v e n i n h i s
youth, Hirst was
a master of dele-
gation. Nearly 30
years ago, he paid
a fisherman £6,
to catch and kill a
shark off the coast
of Queensland in Australia. He
then employed someone to stuff
the shark, another person to make
a container for it, and someone
else to place it in the container.
At this point, Hirst made his sole
c o n t r i b u t i o n t o t h e p r o j e c t.
Remembering the arty title he had
once scribbled on the top of a
s c h o o l e s s a y, h e n a m e d t h e
completed work ‘the Physical
impossibility of Death in the Mind
of someone Living’. the art world
swooned. Yes, they thought, this
i s surely a young man with
something to say!
in fact, it was very much the sort
of wordy, lah-di-dah title Hirst’s
near-contemporary Adrian Mole,
aged 13 3/4, might have penned in
his desperation to impress his
beloved Pandora with his intellec-
tual heft. it meant nothing, but it
did the trick: the dead shark was
instantly snapped up by the
famous advertising mogul Charles
saatchi, who, through a strange
coincidence, had also grown
wealthy by coining a schoolboyish
slogan (‘Labour isn’t Working’).
in 2004, saatchi sold the dead
shark to a hedge fund billionaire
for roughly $8 million. By now,
Hirst had begun employing a
small army of servants working
f o r b a r e l y m o r e t h a n t h e
minimum wage to mass-produce
paintings of coloured spots and
splashes which he then sold for a
small fortune.
Four years later he put 223 new
works up for auction at sotheby’s,
and left the auction £111 million
r i c h e r. A c r o s s t h e w o r l d ,
boardrooms that had once been
decorated with paintings of their
moustachioed Victorian founders
were now home to spitty-spotty
works by Damien Hirst.
Around this time, his manager
would tell Damien Hirst: ‘You’ve
h a d a n o t h e r d o u b l e r o l l o v e r
lottery weekend.’ By this, he
meant that Hirst had made £
to £40 million between Friday
and Monday.
i n 2 0 1 4 , h e s p e n t a s m a l l
proportion of his earnings on a
£34 million house overlooking
Regent’s Park that John Nash had
built in 1811 for
the future King
George iV.
Hirst diversified
into everything
from restaurants
to wallpaper. At
his 2012 retro -
spective at tate
M o d e r n , t h e
m u s e u m s t o r e
w a s s e l l i n g
limited-edition
p l a s t i c s k u l l s
painted in house-
hold gloss for
£3 6 , 8 0 0. t h e
skull on which
they were based,
pr e t e n t i o u s l y
titled ‘For the
L o v e o f G o d ’
a n d e n c r u s t e d w i t h 8 , 6 0 1
diamonds, was offered for sale at
£ 5 0 m i l l i o n , t h o u g h i t i s n o t
known if they ever found someone
rich and foolish enough to pay
that price.
Y
ou might have thought
that all this earning and
spending would have
d o n e s o m e t h i n g t o
dampen Hirst’s self-pity. Not a bit
of it. in the idler, Hirst grumbles
that his bankers and accountants
‘only love you because they’re
taking your money’.
Well, it’s taken a long time for
that particular penny to drop! Did
he really think they loved him for
his charm, his wit, his wisdom, or
— heaven forbid! — his art?
in fact, he seems peculiarly
tongue-tied whenever it comes to
the subject of art. ‘What is art?’
his biographer, Gordon Burn,
asked him on one occasion. ‘it’s a
f***ing poor excuse for life, innit,
eh?’ he replied. But his inarticu-
lacy has, you will be pleased to
learn, done nothing to dent his
opinion of himself. ‘it’s like i’m a
Bonnard, a turner, a Matisse’, he
told Burn. or a Jive Bunny, he
failed to add.
Craig
Brown
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/craigbrown
Picture: ALAMY