While the world’s financial system totters, the shrewd money seems to be pouring into pickled unicorns and winged pigs. It is a striking and thought-provoking fact that on the same day that Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. collapsed, the first session of Damien Hirst’s two-day auction at Sotheby’s, London, took off like a rocket.
The whole affair exceeded estimates by fetching 111.5 million pounds ($199 million). We seem to be living in apocalyptic times just now - thronged with sinister horsemen and seven-headed beasts - so what do these strange creations of Hirst’s portend?
Could this be Armageddon for a powerful section of the art market, namely the dealers, who appear to have been cut right out of the loop? Will the future be full of mega-sales of brand new art passing straight from the studio to the sale-room? Are the great galleries such as those of London’s Hoxton and Soho doomed like the woolly mammoths of old to extinction?
The probable answer is no. Far from such auctions being the art-sales model of the future, it seems quite likely that there’ll never be another one ever again. No other artist fulfills quite the same conditions as Hirst. (Bloomberg)

A few hours before the prominent auction organized by Damien Hirst,  “Beautiful Inside my Head Forever”, there were rumours about a possible failure of the sale, due to the worrying 8% loss of Sotheby’s title at the closing of Wall Street.   Besides Sotheby’s crash, we have seen the failure of Lehman Brothers, which has thrown the financial market into uncertainty. 

Damien Hirst’s “The Golden Calf” kept alive a 10-year bull run in the art market last night as collectors vied for the British artist’s works at Sotheby’s, even as global stock markets collapsed.
Hirst’s “Beautiful Inside My Head For Ever” auction in London took 70.5 million pounds ($126.6 million) with fees, led by the 10.3 million-pound preserved Charolais calf with 18-carat gold horns. The total was a record for a sale of works by one artist, said Sotheby’s, which had estimated the evening would fetch as much as 62.4 million pounds. All but two of the 56 lots sold.
“The sale was magnificent, a triumph”, London dealer Ivor Braka said in an interview. “At a time when other markets are reeling, the people with the free cash and the will have ignored the storm warnings and the voyage goes on”.
The event, which attracted more than 21,000 visitors to the pre-sale view, drew enthusiasic bids in a saleroom of collectors and celebrities such as Bianca Jagger, seated near the front. As bidders pushed up the price of Hirst’s preserved animals and butterflies, financial markets reeled after Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc., the fourth-largest U.S. investment bank, filed for bankruptcy and Merrill Lynch & Co. agreed to be bought by Bank of America for $50 billion. (Bloomberg)

A sale of works by an artist who is said to have collaborated with Andy Warhol has been postponed for a week while the auctioneer gathers evidence that he actually existed.
Pietro Psaier has become a familiar name in auction catalogues over the past 12 years. The works, seemingly influenced by or purportedly made with Warhol, have appeared at sales in New York, the UK and in Madrid. Sotheby’s, Christie’s, Bonhams and Phillips de Pury & Co have all sold works by Psaier, as have country auctioneers Cheffins in Cambridge and John Nicholson of Fernhurst, Surrey, who has sold the most and who was preparing his latest auction of Psaier’s work for tomorrow.
Prices have ranged from £100 to £14,000 for a painting of Marilyn Monroe, and buyers have come from as far afield as Egypt and Kuwait. Many of the works, bought by dealers, have since been exhibited and sold in galleries and at art fairs in London, Cumbria and Harrogate.
But during the summer, a specialist website (warholstars.org) began to investigate claims made in Nicholson’s catalogues that Psaier worked with Warhol. It quoted officials at the Andy Warhol Foundation who said they had never heard of Psaier, and asked whether the whole Psaier story was an elaborate hoax.
Nicholson, a big man with more than 30 years’ experience in the auction business, had the air of a wounded bear when I met him last week to try to unravel the truth. “I’ve sold nearly 1,500 of Psaier’s works since 2004, and no one has complained. But suddenly, last month, I got a call from a journalist saying they were going to publish an article based on the information on the warholstars website with quotes from the Warhol Foundation, and could I prove that Psaier existed. (Telegraph)

Damien Hirst’s auction at Sotheby’s, London, marks a brilliant and radical innovation. The breakthrough isn’t, of course, in the art on view (on which more later). The novelty lies in the method of sale.
Nobody, as far as I know, has ever brought to the saleroom a large batch of new work directly from the studio, or multiple fabrication locations, in Hirst’s case. It misses out a whole stage in the conventional game - the dealer’s role.
Normally it is years, if not decades, before a work of contemporary art comes under the hammer. Wise old art-world hands have wandered around the display muttering about a stroke of genius, which it is. And of course, financially, it could all go wrong. We’ll know the answer to that on the days of the auction, Sept. 15 and 16.
One thing about the whole enterprise is immediately impressive: its sheer scale. It would be wrong to compare this to a private gallery show held in an auction house. The size of it, 10 large rooms and more than 200 works, is more like a major career retrospective at Tate Modern. (Bloomberg)

The Italian art market is continuing to rouse enthusiasm and attract the attention of worldwide famous collectors. A sector that has recorded a constant development over the years. Just think of 2007 when Christie’s and Sotheby’s held the Italian Sales in London. The former auction house had totalled 21 billion euros, while Sotheby’s almost took 22 billion. Last year, both auction houses sold 87% of their catalogue works.  A noticeable result for Sotheby’s, whose highest sale estimate reached 16,740,000 euros, thus realizing a 76% spread, almost equalling the success achieved in 2006, when an 80% increase was recorded.  On the contrary, Christie’s achieved 8% less than the highest estimates.

Francis Bacon’s “Triptych”, showing a headless corpse eaten by birds, stares down from the wall in the big retrospective that opens this week at Tate Britain.
The ominous work made Bacon (1909-1992) the world’s most expensive postwar artist. The centenary exhibition also shows why he is one of the greatest painters of the 20th century.
The show, which opens on Sept. 11, is a serious and thorough survey containing most - if not quite all - of the painter’s major works. Deservedly, this will be popular, offering another generation an opportunity to look at Bacon’s output.
“Triptych” (1976) was purchased at auction in May at Sotheby’s in New York for $86.3 million. At that rate, the 71 paintings in the exhibition are worth - wait while I get my pocket calculator out - somewhere more than $6 billion. (Bloomberg)

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)