Dead cow bounce

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Sep 16th 2008
From Economist.com

An auction of works by Damien Hirst belies the turmoil in financial markets

Sotheby's

A VISIBLE show of support from his two main dealers and determined bidding by a mystery telephone buyer, believed to be Russian, helped dispel the gloom surrounding the financial markets. Enthusiastic bidding lifted the first round of Damien Hirst’s marathon two-day sale of new work at Sotheby’s in London on Monday September 15th.

The mystery buyer bid paid £12.8m ($23m including premiums) for ten of the evening’s 56 lots. This part of the auction raised £70.5m, more than was expected for the entire sale. Two further sessions were set for Tuesday.

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Jay Jopling, Mr Hirst’s London dealer with whom he has worked for nearly 20 years, and a team from Larry Gagosian, his New York dealer, sat in prominent places in two rows at the centre of the auction room. Their support came despite the fact that they had been cut out altogether from the Sotheby’s auction and only learned about it in May when news of the sale was about to be made public. At the time Mr Gagosian told Frank Dunphy, Mr Hirst’s manager: “It sounds like bad business to me. It’ll be confusing to collectors. It’s a bad move.” A peace pact of sorts was agreed last Wednesday when Mr Dunphy took Mr Gagosian on a personal tour of the sale.

In the event, Mr Gagosian himself decided to travel to Moscow on the night, but one of his New York associates, Stefan Ratibor, was there bidding heavily for the sale’s star lot, “The Golden Calf”, a creamy-coloured bull preserved in formaldehyde, with solid gold horns, hooves and halo. Bidding opened at £6m for the piece, which was estimated to fetch at least £8m. Mr Ratibor dropped out at £8.5m and the calf was sold finally to for £9.2m (£10.3m including premiums)to an anonymous telephone bidder.

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The winning bid set an auction record for Mr Hirst, beating the £9.65m that the daughter of the ruler of Qatar, Sheikha al-Mayassa al-Thani, paid last year for “Lullaby Spring”, a huge medicine cabinet made in 2002.

Guests arrived early to ensure they got seats. They included Mark Getty, the grandson of John Paul Getty and the new chairman of London’s National Gallery, Matthew Freud, a PR magnate, Peter Simon, a British retailer and founder of Monsoon and Accessorize, all three members of the Mugrabi family who own already nearly 100 Hirsts, and Sir Norman Rosenthal, a former secretary of the Royal Academy of Arts and one of Mr Hirst’s earliest supporters. Bianca Jagger sat in the front row.

Mr Jopling got the event off to a quick start, bidding £850,000 (£993,250 including premiums) to secure the first lot, a colourful triptych of spun household gloss, butterflies and manufactured diamonds, entitled “Heaven Can Wait”, which was well over the top estimate of £500,000. Mr Jopling also bought three other pieces, a medicine cabinet entitled “The Triumvirate”, that went for the bottom of its estimate, £1.5m (£1.7m with premiums), an oil painting of a photograph of the young Mr Hirst of which there are several copies, and for which he fought with Gagosian’s Mr Ratibor, winning with a bid of £900,000 (£1m with premiums). His best purchase was one of the finest pieces in the sale, a large cruciform vitrine of fish and fish skeletons, entitled “Here Today, Gone Tomorrow”, for which he bid just above the low estimate, £2.6m (£3m including premiums).

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The crowded main room, four additional public rooms in Sotheby’s and countless telephone bidders slowed the pace of the sale. The 56 lots took well over two hours to sell, more than twice the expected norm. Only on a few lots was the bidding brisk; for most of the evening, the auctioneer, Oliver Barker, worked hard to squeeze one bid after another from potential buyers.

An exception to this was the mystery purchaser who bought ten lots, paying well above the top estimate for eight. These included twice the top estimate for two of the shiniest pieces on offer, a gold diptych cabinet of manufactured diamonds called “Memories of You/Moments With You”, and three times the top estimate for a large silver-coloured piece in a similar vein entitled “Fragments of Paradise”.

Mr Hirst spent the evening playing snooker, but on being told the sale figures, he pronounced: “I think the market is bigger than anyone knows. I love art and this proves I’m not alone. And the future looks great for everyone.”