“HIRST thought he made Saatchi. Saatchi thought he made Hirst. There’s all you need for a terminal quarrel between lovers,” a Bond Street dealer close to both men said yesterday.
The quarrel has been three years in the making. “He only recognises art with his wallet,” Hirst stormed about Saatchi and his market manipulations in 2001. Quarrel turned to fury in April when Hirst went to the opening Saatchi show, “dedicated to Damian Hirst, the Alpha-Male of Contemporary British Art, Constantly Re-examining the Beauty Found in Death”, and saw the 45 or so Hirsts that Saatchi owns mostly lost in a rabbit warren of small brown County Hall backrooms down lonely corridors, where many thought they looked ineffective and absurd.
Hirst, who had no say in the exhibition, told Saatchi what he thought. He told him how he should be shown: sky-high and dramatic as in the yawning white spaces of the White Cube gallery in Hoxton. He added that he did not care to see himself mixed up with and hidden behind works by Jake and Dinos Chapman, Tracey Emin, Marc Quinn, Sarah Lucas and Gavin Turk.
Saatchi hit back nastily in Time Out: “Many in the art world, artists included, think they can only be seen in pristine white space . . . It’s time to break out of the White Cube timewarp . . . (art like that) condemns itself to a worryingly limited lifespan.”
Since then, Hirst has left the Saatchi retrospective off his curriculum vitae and Saatchi has more or less stopped buying Hirst. A sale has been on the cards all summer.
As Hirst’s No 1 patron since 1990 (when he paid £1,000 for a medicine cabinet) drops out of the market, is this the moment that the artist’s sliced cattle, embalmed sheep, insectocutors and tanks drop in value around the world? “No one wins,” was the instant response of one Bond Street Hirst man yesterday. “It’s bad for both of them.”
The risk is that 45 Hirsts all sold back to White Cube will bring a glut on the market. But given that they are mostly high-quality early Hirsts, made before the repetitious flood of spot-and-spin paintings, there should be no problem. There is a long line of international buyers.
Beyond that, Hirst and the dealer Jay Jopling are cash-rich and do not need to sell in any hurry. Saatchi may be providing the market with an unrepeatable chance to mop up highly desirable work.
For Saatchi — “he believes he can affect art values with buying power and he still believes he can do it” sneered Hirst in a recent book — there will, short term, be a fat, fat profit. He is almost certainly not selling back to White Cube at cost and paid under £10,000 for most of the works.
For Hirst, it may be the best thing to cut his ties with the patron who has made him and manipulated him and to rebase himself and his art on a broad international market.
COWS, PIGS, SPOTS AND SPIN
沒有留言:
張貼留言