Whipped Cream Difficulties

Damien Hirst has done other works than “The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living“.

One of those was a diamond encrusted skull called “For the Love of God”.

Back in 2007, Hirst’s market was exploding. The same year he said he sold For the Love of God, his work made a total of $86.3 million at auction, according to the Artnet Price Database. The following year, he notoriously sold his work directly through Sotheby’s for a whopping $201 million. But his auction sales never approached those heights again. (Last year, his work generated $38 million, a 13-year high.)

Hirst has claimed for a while now that he sold the work for $100 million in 2007.

Turns out…

In a profile published in the New York Times on the occasion of his first New York show in four years, Hirst said the work, titled For the Love of God and allegedly made from more than 8,600 diamonds, was sitting in a storage facility in Hatton Garden, London’s jewelry district.
According to Hirst, he still owns the bauble in partnership with his gallery, White Cube, and a group of unnamed investors.

More:

In the recent Hirst New York Times profile, the newspaper took at face value the artist’s claim that he sold around 80 new works for between $750,000 and $3.5 million each.
“We could have sold many, many more,” Larry Gagosian told the Times. “People were literally begging to buy these paintings.”

ArtNet article. Some people have told me they have trouble with this link, so here’s an archive.is version.

NYT profile.

“He’s a talented artist, but this? Really?” said Alan Baldwin, an art collector, looking down recently at a fluffy black sculpture of a spider with bow legs and googly eyes. Back in 1992, three years before winning the prestigious Turner Prize, its creator had astounded the art world by displaying a real 14-foot tiger shark embalmed in a tank of formaldehyde.

Archive version of the NYT profile.

This entry was posted on Saturday, January 29th, 2022 at 10:54 am and is filed under Art. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.