Hirst Sale, Lehman Bust Mark End of Frothy Era
2008-12-22 09:19:47 Martin Gayford
This Christmas we are looking back on one year, though two distinct epochs. There was the time before the collapse of Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc., and the anxious new era we now inhabit. Marking the division, like the Duchess of Richmond’s ball on the eve of the Battle of Waterloo in 1815, was the Damien Hirst auction at Sotheby’s London.
The first half of this unprecedented -- and probably under present conditions unrepeatable -- 111.5 million pound ($166 million at current rates) two-day sale took place on Sept. 15, the day Lehman sought bankruptcy protection. Colossal sums were paid for pickled unicorns, flying pigs and a Golden Calf with hooves and horns of solid bullion.
The U.K. artist was fortunate to stage his innovative auction of brand-new work at just that moment. Just a few weeks later and it might well have fizzled as many art sales did. (Sotheby’s said on Dec. 4 that its board approved job cuts that will reduce salaries and other related costs by $7 million in 2009.)
Hirst’s work, with its emphasis on precious materials and artificially suspended putrefaction, now seems emblematic of a vanished age of excess, built, as we have discovered, on a mountain of rotten debt. His sale was as neat a metaphor for wider events as anyone could hope for, though a pickled flying pig proved sounder than an investment with Bernard Madoff.
Freud Record
In that pre-September art boom, the winners were just about everybody -- artists, dealers and collectors. Perhaps the most glittering accolade went to Lucian Freud, who on May 13 became the world’s most expensive living artist, when his painting “Benefits Supervisor Sleeping” sold for $33.6 million at Christie’s International in New York.
Later in the year, Freud gave the first filmed interview he has granted since the 1980s. This, to the U.K.’s Channel 4 News, was in honor of a towering predecessor in the pantheon of painting, namely Titian.
The National Galleries of London and Edinburgh have been struggling to buy the latter’s “Diana and Actaeon” for what still seems a bargain 50 million pounds. If, as reports are now claiming, that great picture is about to be purchased for the U.K., it will be a triumph for the directors of the two museums, Nicholas Penny and John Leighton.
Penny, having announced no ambitious plans when he took on the job at the London National Gallery earlier in the year, will have brought off the most spectacular addition to British public art collections in decades.
Saatchi Beauty
Charles Saatchi also enjoyed a successful autumn. With the opening of his new premises in Chelsea, he once again became the proprietor of the most beautiful contemporary-art space in London -- as his first gallery in St. John’s Wood also was, and his second, in old County Hall, wasn’t. The exhibition of Chinese works at the new Saatchi venue is pulling record crowds for a show of cutting-edge art -- 5,200 a day reported by the Observer weekly newspaper -- though, admittedly, admission is free.
The season was less festive at Tate, where the flagship Turner Prize was widely panned by critics, including this one, for an utter lack of sparkle and pizzazz. Over at the Royal Academy there is an interregnum, following the departure of the previous brilliant director of exhibitions, Norman Rosenthal, at the start of the year. That perhaps explains a lack of the usual oomph in the academy’s big show of the autumn, “Byzantium.”
Will the academy return to form under Rosenthal’s successor, Kathleen Soriano? Will the Turner shock and intrigue once more as it did in yesteryear? For the answer to those, and many other questions, we must await the green shoots of spring.
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