THE contemporary

The contemporary art market
300
200
100
2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013 2014 2015
Saatchi Gallery – London
Auction > $2 million
Auction > $15 million
Lehman Brothers Bankruptcy
Sale
Beautiful Inside My Head Forever
Gagosian Gallery – 11 sites
Retrospective – Tate Modern
Price Index for Damien Hirst Base 100 in January 2000
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one that he has constantly reinterpreted since the
end of the 1980s and a favourite with the collectors.
Already in 2002, Swamped fetched Peter Doig’s
auction record of $455,000 at Sotheby’s in London.
Since then its price has multiplied by 57 times. In
just 13 years, Peter Doig has become a veritable
icon of Contemporary painting.
Damien Hirst – the enfant
terrible in disgrace
Damien Hirst is one of the artists who most benefited
from the market euphoria of the 2000s and
who has logically suffered the most from its return
to sanity in the 2010s. In fact the auction prices of
the British enfant terrible have never recovered: his
price index is down -83% since its peak in 2008
and the volume of transactions on his work is down
91%. Here is a brief overview of his tumultuous career,
which is still generating controversy.
In 1988, the unknown but clearly inspired Damien
Hirst conceived and curated the Freeze show
in a London warehouse, bringing together his
own works plus those of his friends at Goldsmiths
College. At the time, his works and those of Gary
Hume, Sarah Lucas and Fiona Rae had no particular
pecuniary value, but the audacious move attracted
the attention of the notorious gallery owner
and advertising mogul Charles Saatchi. The latter’s
mentorial and proselytising expertise, in conjunction
with Jay Jopling’s similar skills (White Cube
Gallery), projected Damien Hirst to the forefront of
the British art scene in record time.
In 1992, year of the Young British Artists exhibition
at the Saatchi Gallery, Hirst already epitomised the
revolutionary spirit of a new and flamboyant movement
that became known as YBA. The following
year, he created Mother & Child, Divided (a cow and
its calf sectioned and immersed in formalin) for the
Venice Biennial, a ‘shock’ installation that earned
him the 1995 Turner Prize. In 1997, his notoriety
became international with the controversy surrounding
the Sensation exhibition at the Royal Academy
of Art in London, which attracted 300,000
visitors. His auction results at the time already
suggested the emergence of a speculative dynamic:
a first medicine cabinet, God (1989), tripled its high
estimate when it fetched $315,000 1 . At that point,
Damien Hirst was at the bottom of a bidding tornado
that he deftly accelerated with characteristic
irreverence.
His dominance of the Contemporary art market
reached a high mark in 2007 when he briefly became
the most expensive living artist with Lullaby
Spring, a large-scale pharmacy cabinet containing
1) Christie’s London, 22 April 1998.
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