Damien Hirst sells the contents of Pharmacy as the eagerly anticipated second Frieze Art Fair gets under way in London. In contrast, New York offers antiques, and Madrid, Spanish Old Masters

Apollo, Oct, 2004 by Susan Moore

It is an intriguing thought that Pharmacy--the late and some might say great restaurant that until recently adorned London's Notting Hill--could lay claim to being the gesamtkunstwerk or 'total art work' of the late twentieth century. In 1997, Matthew Freud approached the enfant terrible of the Brit Art scene, Damien Hirst, with the idea of collaborating on a restaurant, and when Hirst discovered that not only would he supply the art work for the interiors but would have carte blanche in the design of absolutely everything, the project took off.

Hirst was involved with the design of every last detail, from the stained glass windows, the wallpaper and the logos on the plates to the aspirin-shaped bar stools and the conical-flask light fittings. For Pharmacy was, of course, conceived as an extension of Hirst's feted Pharmacy installation of 1992, now owned by Tate. All four walls of the bar were fitted with pill-packed pharmaceutical cabinets, staff wore uniforms inspired by surgical gowns and lab coats (designed by Prada) and dominating the upstairs dining room was a giant molecular model sculpture. It looked so much like a chemist's shop that people often mistook it for one, and brought in their prescriptions. As the artist gleefully recalled: 'A woman asked me once for an aspirin and I had to say "I'm sorry we have a strictly no drugs policy here"'. Even the Royal Pharmaceutical Society threatened legal action, which is why the name temporarily changed to an anagram, Army Chap.

As Hirst put it: 'My original intention was to make a great place for people to be--maybe a little surreal, like eating in a chemist--but great nonetheless, and it worked.' When the restaurant opened in 1998, it proved a huge success with the art, media and fashion crowd and exemplified the whole New Labour/Cool Britannia spirit of the age. Subsequently sold, the cool crowd moved on and the restaurant lost its way, closing its doors for the last time in September 2003. The ever-canny Hirst had only ever leased his artwork to the enterprise, and, retaining it, is now selling it at Sotheby's in London on 18 October. 'I mean, I can only use so many plates and pots and plans myself ...'

For the view, the auction-house is all but recreating the restaurant as an installation--including the two great three-dimensional medicine cabinets measuring some 3.5 by 2.5 metres, plus wall-mounted cabinets, bar stools, the butterfly paintings that hung on the walls and the skeletons exhibited as art works. According to Sotheby's expert Oliver Barker, however, the sale has been carefully edited. 'We could not sell absolutely everything but there will be an opportunity to buy anything from salt and pepper shakers (estimate 30 [pounds sterling]-40 [pounds sterling]) and Martini glasses (estimate 50 [pounds sterling]-70 [pounds sterling]) to the butterfly paintings (estimates from 35,000 [pounds sterling]) and the large medicine cabinets (400,000 [pounds sterling]-600,000 [pounds sterling]).' There will also be original paintings and drawings of the artist's designs, plus two now 7ft-in-diameter pill paintings that the artist has produced to sell for charity--to benefit both Scope and Strummerville.

According to Barker, the estimates are conservative (the whole sale is expected to fetch at least 3.6 million [pounds sterling]). Certainly the artist has achieved big prices recently at sales at Phillips, de Pury and Luxembourg in New York. A medical installation, Something solid beneath the surface of all creatures great and small (2001), realised a record $1.64m in November 2003, and a wall-mounted medicine cabinet with ladder fetched just over $1m in May. The artist's star still appears to be ascendant--a big retrospective is to open in Naples later this month and rumour has it that Christie's owner, Francois Pinault, is planning a big show in his gallery in Paris. As for Pharmacy, perhaps it should have been listed. At any rate, it remains a remarkably cohesive project and one which has few parallels. The most famous artist's restaurant project of the century was, of course, Mark Rothko's murals for Philip Johnson's Four Seasons restaurant in the Seagram Building in New York, commissioned in 1958, but they, as every Tate visitor knows, were never installed--and no one will ever know what Rothko would have made of Martini glasses or bar stools.

It is no coincidence that the Pharmacy view opens the same day--14 October--as the preview of the second Frieze Art Fair (15-18 October) on the south side of Regent's Park in London. While most new art fairs take a while to establish themselves, Frieze, a fair for cutting-edge international contemporary art, was an immediate and astonishing success, drawing an impressive roll-call of 124 leading international galleries, a highly respectable 27,000 visitors and, no less critically, a significant number of the big international players in this increasingly competitive field. According to co-director Matthew Slotover, some 16m [pounds sterling]-20m [pounds sterling] of work was sold last year, and dealers, who tended to play it safe, felt they could have sold more highly valued pieces. Says Slotover: 'We could not have hoped for a more successful inaugural fair but we see it more as a statement of intent--an initial building block upon which we can develop Frieze Art Fair as an annual headline event in the global art calendar and a showcase that reinforces London's status as one of the most important art centres in the world.'