Hirst and Saatchi: the YBA buy-out - Front Page

Art in America, Feb, 2004 by David Ebony

In recent months, the London art world has been buzzing about the decision by mega-collector Charles Saatchi to sell off part of his extensive holdings of works by Damien Hirst. The move recalled a moment in the late 1980s, when Saatchi abruptly placed numerous works by Sandro Chia and Sean Scully on the market. Some observers at the time claimed that Saatchi's actions significantly diminished both the reputations of those artists and the price levels of their works. In an attempt to avoid a similar situation, Hirst, the erstwhile Young British Artist (YBA) wunderkind, and his dealer Jay Jopling of London's White Cube, agreed to pay Saatchi a reported $15 million for 12 major pieces. That sum conforms to the prices of Hirst works at auction, which recently passed the $1-million mark in a record-breaking New York sale last fall [see "Front Page," Jan. '04].

According to British press reports, Hirst and Saatchi had a falling out when the artist chose to disclaim the retrospective exhibition of his works that helped inaugurate the new Saatchi Gallery at London's County Hall [see "Artworld," June '03]. He was angry over the way the works were displayed and appalled that Saatchi had decided to include a car that Hirst painted with his trademark dots for a charity auction. Hirst maintains that the piece was not intended as a serious work. To make his point clear, he ordered his gallery representatives to excise the show from his exhibition history.

Among the works that Saatchi reportedly sold to Hirst and Jopling are well-known pieces such as This little piggy went to market, this little piggy stayed home (1996), a kinetic work featuring a bisected pig in a formaldehyde tank, and A Thousand Years (1990), a glass-boxed installation in which a decomposing cow's head is covered with hatching flies that eventually get zapped in a nearby electric fly trap. A number of Hirst paintings and sculptures, however, remain on view at the Saatchi Gallery, including The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living (1991), perhaps the artist's most famous work, containing a large shark suspended in a tank of formaldehyde.