Afternoon:
10°c
Hirst loses his thirst for spots and pickled cows
Louise Jury, Chief Arts Correspondent22 Aug 2008
Damien Hirst has vowed to stop making some of the series of works that have made him famous.
He plans to make no more paintings with butterflies or larger spots and has only a handful of formaldehyde works he intends to complete.
Speaking as he prepares to sell an estimated £65 million of new work at auction, Hirst, 43, said: "I feel like I've started the series and I have to end them all.
"Stop the butterflies, stop the spots. There's a few works I want to make informaldehyde. I always said I imagined a zoo of dead animals in the beginning."
Among the final works in the formaldehyde series he has dubbed Natural History will be a giant crucified cow.
But he says as soon as he made the decision to stop the series, he immediately thought of new exciting variations - such as spot works with 1.5 mm dots.
"I think I'm ending all the series then you wake up in the night and say, 'What about a cabinet of flies not diamonds?'"
In interviews online and in the catalogue for Sotheby's, which is selling 223 lots of new Hirst works on 15 and 16 September, the artist muses on money, museums and mortality. "I think money's always been something I've thought a lot about. It's one of the big ones," he said. "You can just put it together with love, religion, science, death."
Auctioning so many works at one time was a risk, he said, because it couldgowrong. "I think it takes a bit of courage, or madness, to get to the point where you just cut out the galleries and take a whole load of box-fresh pieces straight to market, no strings, highest bidder wins."
But he thought the market was big enough. "I think potentially it's much, much wider, and everybody's got panicked into thinking you've got to be careful. I don't think you have to be careful. I think the market can take a lot of art, especially if it's good art."
He hoped everything would sell - but even if it went badly, it opened the door to a new way of operating, he said.
Hirst will return to showing through galleries afterwards, but he attacked the experience for potential buyers: "It's really difficult to buy a work in a gallery. They can be snobby and they can look down on you."
Describing himself as "an OAP" and "no longer the enfant terrible," Hirst will not attend the auctions but intends to play snooker, as he did when the contents of the Pharmacy restaurant he co-owned were sold.
