Damien Hirst, the U.K.’s richest artist, is hoping his “Beautiful Inside My Head Forever” auction of new works at Sotheby’s in London will shake up the art market.
Speaking in an interview today in London, he described the traditional system of dealers selling artists’ works as “unfair”.
“It seems sad that artists don’t make money”, he said. “If you say to someone that galleries take 50 percent, they’d be shocked by that. In any other business, it’s an extortionate amount of money. I’ve never thought it made much sense”.
Hirst, 43, said that Sotheby’s was not charging him any fees for the auction: “I now have the choice of selling in a gallery or at an auction”. Sitting at a mahogany table in the Sotheby’s boardroom and surrounded by his butterfly paintings, he said that his next exhibition will be at a commercial gallery, “if they’ll have me”.
“I definitely get a kick out of upsetting a lot of people”, said Hirst, wearing a black suit with a T-shirt underneath.
The 223-lot sale, to be held on Sept. 15 and 16, is expected to fetch at least 65 million pounds ($114.5 million), said Sotheby’s.
According to the catalog, buyers at the Hirst sale - which went on view to the public on Sept. 5 - would be charged a sliding-scale fee starting at 25 percent for works priced less than 25,000 pounds. All the works have been produced in the last two years with the aid of assistants at the artist’s six studios in Devon, Gloucestershire and London.
Dealers said this was the first time a major contemporary artist had sold a large body of work directly through an auction house rather than through a commercial gallery.
According to an article published yesterday in the Sunday Times, the artist’s manager Frank Dunphy said Hirst was worth $1 billion and the “biggest dollar earner in the history of art”.
Hirst owns between 30 and 40 properties, including a 3 million-pound country house in Gloucestershire and a pair of houses in Mayfair, said the newspaper. The official Sunday Times Rich List 2008 calculated Hirst’s fortune at 200 million pounds. (Bloomberg)