The opulent ballroom of a five-star hotel in New Delhi is not the sort of place you would expect to see forbidding photorealistic depictions of skulls, pills and biopsies or paintings composed of butterflies trapped in paint. But then overturning expectations has long been the forte of Damien Hirst—the world's most expensive living artist, whose meditations on mortality are on display for the first time in India.
During his two-decade-long career, the 43-year-old "enfant terrible" of the international art world has founded his fame, notoriety and £100 million fortune on consistently overturning expectations, as well as shocking hapless viewers of his oeuvre, which feature bisected barnyard animals gazing benignly out of formaldehyde baths, or maggots teeming over glutinous slime in a severed cow's head. The Englishman's most famous work, however, is his 14-foot tiger shark, tail a-sway, memorably titled The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living.
Nothing quite as unsettling was among the 14 pieces that went on display at the Oberoi Hotel on August 28 and 29 as part of a preview of Sotheby's upcoming London auction of a prodigious 223-piece collection straight from Hirst's studio. Unfortunately, the most highly priced works proved much too onerous to transport: a foal with a silvery resin horn (The Dream, £3 million), a calf sporting 18-carat gold hooves and horns (The Golden Calf, £12 million), and yet another tiger shark, its jaw agape (The Kingdom, £6 million). The whole lot is called, with characteristically cryptic Hirstian flourish, Beautiful Inside My Head Forever, and is valued at a "conservative" £65 million (Rs 520 crore).
That Sotheby's expects such unconventional, exorbitantly priced pieces to tempt Indian clients is a nod of acknowledgement to the emerging "maturity" and clout of Indian buyers, who have long been derided as conservative patrons of kitsch and cliche destined for drawing rooms. Not so, says Oliver Barker, Sotheby's senior international specialist on contemporary art, who points out that Indian collectors have even placed bids on edgier works by pop artists like Andy Warhol, Richard Prince and Jeff Koons. "We have got clear evidence that there's a growing number of Indian buyers, with a thirst for both Indian and Western art."
Skull with Pills, another noted work
But are they ready for skulls, pills and animal cadavers? Yes, asserts Barker. "Hirst's work is sure to attract Indian buyers. It deals with universal themes—love, death, art, life, medicine—that are not simply relevant to people in the West." Interest in Hirst's work, he says, has been widening of late, from his regular European and American buyers to institutions like the Tate Modern and so-called emerging markets like China and Russia. So India can't be far behind.
Bristol-born Hirst's ascendancy began 20 years ago, when he was anointed the leader of the pack of iconoclastic 'Young British Artists', whose installations confounded, enraged and fascinated the critics and public. Advertising mogul Charles Saatchi was his first, most powerful patron, promoting and displaying Hirst's flayed and bisected animal cadavers in the Saatchi gallery. Following a Turner Prize win in 1995, Hirst's fame rose, as did debates and controversies on the worth of his art.
Plagiarism charges abounded, due to Hirst's magpie-like ability to appropriate ideas he glimpsed around him, dramatise them with overblown titles and co-opt them into his slowly gathering repertoire contemplating death and the futility and fragility of life. The chief leitmotifs among these were decaying corpses, skulls, medicine cabinets and molecular structures. The range also included paintings that were far easier to acquire: 'spot' paintings and 'spin' paintings, both churned out by Hirst's little army of assistants—which threw up yet another controversy on authorship and the role of the "neo-conceptual artist".
Psalm 27: Hirst’s butterfly and enamel paint on canvas
This so-called conceptual art lacked concepts, countered the Stuckists, a movement that faced off against Hirst and all he stood for. His most strident detractors, they jeered that a dead shark in formaldehyde threw up no metaphysical reflections on life: "It is just dead. The only possible comment that it makes is that to be dead is like being in a contemporary art gallery."
These raging debates have only served to precipitate Hirst's meteoric rise. Last year, his medicine cabinet Lullaby Spring briefly created an auction record: £9.65 million. And his death fixation took a decidedly gaudy turn when he concocted the most expensive piece of contemporary art: a platinum skull modelled on that of an 18th-century man, with his original teeth intact, a grotesquely comic touch. Covered with 8,601 dazzling diamonds, the piece was ironically titled For the Love of God. "I just want to celebrate life by saying to hell with death," said Hirst. And saying it in such an extravagant way that it took £15 million to produce. Only an investment consortium including himself could afford to fork out the asking price of £50 million.
You might want to side with the sceptics and critics in thinking of Hirst as the P.T. Barnum of the artworld; a showman and confidence trickster who has no more than outlandish stunts with over-inflated prices to his credit. But that he's a setter of precedents is beyond a doubt: he's the first contemporary artist to acquire the mystique and self-assurance of a rockstar. And to have done so despite blatantly stating that it's beside the point that he doesn't produce much of his artwork himself. Now, he's the first artist to do away with the gallery and dealer system and take his works straight to auction. Sotheby's is certainly not complaining: "It's a great way to get more clients interested, and a hugely democratic way of buying, not based on privilege," crows Barker. Perhaps Indian buyers will respond to it with their paddles raised, on September 15.
