Damien Hirst: Bad Boy Makes Good
For more than a decade Damien Hirst has been one of the richest and most famous artists in the world. All 
the same, when you sit down with him, he still seems surprised by it. “I grew up with quite an impoverished background,” he says. “I didn’t see any possibility that I would ever get paid for doing anything
I enjoyed.” Hirst tells me this one rainy afternoon in July at one of his many studios. This one is in Stroud, a rural town in Gloucestershire, about two hours’ drive west of London. When he says this I think immediately about the bull in the next room, which I’m pretty sure he enjoyed coming up with, and very sure he’s about to be paid for. A lot, actually.
The bull is called The Golden Calf and it’s headed to market at Sotheby’s in London, where it will be the star of a much hyped two-day sale of 223 works by Hirst that begins on Sept. 15. This will be the first time any auction house has sold a quantity of work fresh out of an artist’s studio. As auction prices for contemporary art have rocketed ever higher, galleries have been dreading this very possibility: that a famous artist would bypass his dealers — who usually get a cut of roughly half of a work’s sale price — and make straight for the auction houses. (The auctioneer’s fee is paid by the buyer on top of the sale price, which means Hirst will walk away with pretty much every dollar his work gets hammered down for.) If it meets expectations, the sale could put about $120 million into Hirst’s already well-lined pockets, a payday unlike anything any living artist has seen. And The Golden Calf will be the prime lot, with a presale estimate of $14.6 million to $22 million. Sometimes a bull is truly a cash cow.
And also a very witty performance. The Golden Calf is a white bullock preserved in a tank of formaldehyde that’s mounted on a high marble plinth. His hooves and horns are 18-carat gold. His head is crowned by a gold Egyptian solar disk. Seen head-on, he’s a false idol whose headgear is simultaneously silly and mesmerizing. (Hirst is assuming his buyers know the Bible story about worshipping a false god, just like the one they are about to worship.) But the beast is best seen in profile, the view that leaves you to reconcile as best you can his hieratic gravity with the laugh-out-loud abundance of his genitals. When Hirst is good, he’s good, and The Golden Calf is a nimble concoction, designed to all at once beguile, flatter and parody the big-swinging billionaires who are likely to bid on it.
Going once. Going twice.