Head made of blood sold by Saatchi for profit of £1,487,000

By Arifa Akbar
Thursday, 21 April 2005

Marc Quinn's famous sculpture moulded with eight pints of his own blood was regarded as one of the signature pieces of the Young British Artists when the new Saatchi Gallery opened less than two years ago.

Marc Quinn's famous sculpture moulded with eight pints of his own blood was regarded as one of the signature pieces of the Young British Artists when the new Saatchi Gallery opened less than two years ago.

Now Charles Saatchi, the gallery owner and one-time patron of the YBAs, has sold the work, Self, to an American collector for £1.5m, further fuelling rumours that his love affair with the movement is at an end.

Saatchi bought it in 1991 when Quinn was relatively unknown and its sale is thought to have earned him a profit of £1,487,000.

The sale follows a period of artistic overhaul for Saatchi. In January this year, the unmade beds and sharks in formaldehyde which had drawn visitors to his gallery in County Hall, London, were swapped for oil paintings owned by Saatchi, in a year-long exhibition called The Triumph of Painting.

While the gallery remains tight-lipped about the future of pieces which once heralded a new wave of daring, often shocking, British conceptual art, many works have already been sold.

Damien Hirst bought back several of his own works from Saatchi in 2003, for a reported £7.8m. These included a sliced pig in formaldehyde, This Little Piggy went to Market, which alone was valued at £1.5m. Hirst's seminal work, The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living, a shark in formaldehyde which became emblematic of the YBA generation, was sold for a reported £6.25m in January this year.

Saatchi is thought to have parted with one of his favourite pieces by Hirst, a sheep in formaldehyde, entitled Away from the Flock, for £2.1m. He has also sold Rachel Whiteread's elegiac piece Ghost, as well as Ron Muerk's sculpture Dead Dad which appeared in the central space of Saatchi's gallery at County Hall.

Many art critics have taken Saatchi's reconfiguration of his gallery to signify the death of the YBA movement, which rose to such prominence a decade ago. Others have suggested that he is cashing in on the works that he helped to make famous to finance his latest passion for paintings.

But Anna Somers Cocks, editor-in-chief of The Art Newspaper, said that although Saatchi helped to make the work of the YBAs fashionable, his latest move would not sound the death knell for the conceptual art of that generation.

"If these artists are still fetching good prices, it means there are a whole variety of people buying them," she said. "I don't think we will find that just because Saatchi has sold a few pieces, that prices will fall. It does not depend on one art collector. The market for contemporary art is very wide in Europe and America and it is a well supported market. Damien Hirst is considered a YBA and his prices are going higher and higher. There are enough other buyers out there to prove there is interest."

Some art experts believe the sale of extraordinary works that Saatchi amassed in the 1990s will, on reflection, be a huge mistake.

Quinn's self portrait, Self, created in 1991, was made from blood taken from him over a period of five months. The blood was poured into a negative mould of the artist's head and frozen. This cast was exhibited in a glass container set on top of a refrigeration unit at the Saatchi Gallery from 1992 until last year.

The piece has subsequently become a touchstone for a particular brand of art of the body and is regarded as a sensitive meditation on mortality and the fragility of life. Rumours of it melting after workmenreportedly pulled the plug on a refrigerator have prolonged the notoriety and visibility of the work

A spokeswoman for the Saatchi Gallery confirmed that Quinn's sculpture had been sold. But a statement added: "Saatchi has been the biggest buyer of contemporary art over the last two years. He has set record prices for many artists in auction."

Saatchi's other sales

* Damien Hirst's shark, The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living, is believed to have been sold to a US collector, Steven Cohen, for a figure of between £6m and £7m. Saatchi bought it for £50,000 in 1991.

* Rachel Whiteread's Ghost, a sculpture from 1990, was a plaster cast of a living room modelled on a house in north London similar to the one she grew up in. It was sold for an unknown amount.

* Damien Hirst repurchased up to 12 of the works that Saatchi collected at the beginning of the artist's career for a rumoured £7.8m including This Little Piggy Went To Market, from 1996.

* Away From The Flock, also by Hirst, is believed to have been sold for £2.1m.

* Four works by Ron Muerk are believed to have been sold including Dead Dad, Angel, Mask and Pinocchio.

This Is Your Brain on Pause

Reuters Damien Hirst's "Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind"

By MICHAEL KIMMELMAN

Published: April 3, 2005

Gagosian Gallery "Autopsy With Brain Out" by Damien Hirst, in a show at the Gagosian Gallery.

WITH his first New York show since 2000, Damien Hirst, abandoning his famous menagerie of dead sharks and pharmaceuticals and eight-foot-wide ashtrays and air-blown beach balls and humongous anatomical models, has unveiled at Larry Gagosian's Chelsea emporium 31 photorealist paintings, all heavily assistant-aided and tongue in cheek. The subjects include skulls, crystals, pills, a doctor proffering a brain, an empty hospital hallway, an emaciating crack addict, a bloody soccer hooligan, dissecting tables - campy shockers, aimed at Page Six and hedge fund speculators.

The show's opening galvanized the predictable mob of ebullient celebrities and tut-tutting rubberneckers. They cheerfully congregated before paintings of car bombings and of a monkey receiving an injection in the face. It isn't clear whether anyone noticed, amid the revelry, that a moment had passed.

That moment encompasses the laddish phase of Mr. Hirst's charmed pop-star trajectory, which first brought him widespread fame more than a decade ago as the clowning, precocious ringmaster of the Young British Artists. The Y.B.A.'s were, and are, a diverse group, their linkage really just a marketing ploy by their prime collector, Charles Saatchi. The term is now outmoded and, like Mr. Hirst, middle-aged. But in its day, Mr. Hirst was the group's natural front man. He had talent, and he had the act down. He was a buoyant and canny entrepreneur and impresario, a savvy scavenger of art history with a nose for fashion and publicity; and he concocted a big, shiny, brightly colored and easily accessible universe of giddy, winning naughtiness. The universe consisted of putrefying animals, gynecological equipment, dot and spin paintings, glass, mirror and stainless steel.

Mr. Hirst's recipe was a love-it-or-hate-it cocktail of death, celebrity, sex and technology, heavily spiked with comic self-promotion. The work was at heart about money, or about the love affair between art and money, Warhol's juicy subject. It openly trumpeted its own costly materialism and cheap thrills, in keeping with a certain upbeat and winking strain of pop culture.

Americans could recognize in Mr. Hirst a cross between Jeff Koons and Julian Schnabel, although he was always a British type - the pied piper of cheekiness. His vulgar, macabre delirium was awful, but almost endearing: Mr. Hirst had just enough panache to charm some fence sitters and keep detractors off balance. He also had a real knack for clinical materials that married Duchamp to Donald Judd. It became his signature mode.

So did his sense of fun. That he was part owner and designer of a short-lived London hot spot was in keeping. Like him, it succeeded spectacularly by failing in the end. The Pharmacy was a restaurant outfitted with pharmaceutical cabinets and a staff decked in Prada lab coats. Briefly, it captured the New Labor/Cool Brittania spirit of the late 90's. When it folded in 2003, after being sold, Mr. Hirst, who had shrewdly only leased its art, then bought its fixtures and fittings, auctioned the lot - which fetched $20 million at Sotheby's, souvenirs of style. Not long before the present show opened in New York, word got out, conveniently for Mr. Hirst and Mr. Gagosian, that a hedge fund billionaire named Stephen Cohen had paid the sensational price of $8 million (or possibly more) for Mr. Hirst's shark in formaldehyde. The seller was Mr. Saatchi, who has lately turned his attention instead to (surprise) paintings. Meanwhile, Mr. Hirst's new show has reportedly sold out. The paintings were said to be priced at up to $2 million apiece.

Promoting the exhibition, Mr. Hirst has burbled on about the joys and mysteries of painting and the deeper meanings of his spooky symbolism in ways surely calculated to sound naïve and cunning at the same time. Irony inoculates him against criticism, starting with the obvious criticism that his latest pictures are terrible. They are, Mr. Hirst can say.Warhol is his role model, but increasingly also his rebuke. Warhol got there first and did it all better, years ago, including the deadpan corporate routine and the death-obsessed imagery, which in Mr. Hirst's new paintings seems second-hand and off the mark. Photorealism in its original incarnation was a hit-and-miss offshoot of Pop and a response to Abstract Expressionism; it shared with Minimalism and Conceptualism a cool, detached faith in order; it gravitated toward banal, not outlandish, subjects so that people would focus more on its mechanical ethos. By comparison, Mr. Hirst's flat-footed pictures, blithely lacking finesse, ignore photorealism's first goals and aspire only to be passingly ghoulish.

And absent invention, they hang there like corpses. They also arrive amid a booming youth market, as shallow and money-obsessed as Mr. Hirst, and just as enamored of fashion, but with a higher premium placed on solo handicraft and earnestness or at least on the appearance of it. Other paintings abound in Chelsea for comparison - not universally good, but generally craftier about the medium, making more of paint's expressive potential and its physical allure. Just up the block from Gagosian, on 24th Street, are shows by Magnus von Plessen, Jules de Balincourt, Martin Kippenberger, Eric Fischl and Gary Hume that at least feature more painterly paintings.

Mr. Hirst proffers instead a grab bag of apparent allusions - to artists like Gerhard Richter and Bridget Riley and Luc Tuymans - as if to compensate for his carefree lack (or his assistants' lack) of formal skills and to flatter insiders. But the painter who leaps first to mind is Damian Loeb, America's Motel 6 version of a bad boy photorealist, who traffics in supposedly shocking subjects. It doesn't get worse than to say that Mr. Hirst looks as if he is following in the footsteps of Mr. Loeb, who had once followed in his, hoping for tabloid notoriety. The era of the giant strutting ego as the amusing subject of art at this moment seems wincingly passé, supplanted by all those insouciant 20-somethings proffering their monkish, shuffling sort of virtuosity.

So investors and glossy magazines keep Mr. Hirst's business and celebrity booming. But being gifted and savvy, he might want to return to the drawing board. His act has jumped the shark.