What Damien Hirst is up to

I’ve written about others taking jabs at Damien Hirst lately. While others are taking pokes at him, he is busy.

According to TIME:

“On September 15 and 16, Damien Hirst, 43, already one of the world’s richest artists, will take 223 new works directly to auction at Sotheby’s in London, in a sale that could bring $230 million or more. / The auction marks the first time an artist has sold a sizable amount of work directly from his own studio, bypassing the galleries and dealers who have traditionally operated as the art world’s middlemen.”

That’s a staggering amount of money. And likely not something that will endear him to others in the art world. Nor will bypassing the art world’s middlemen win him many friends.

It also says that he is going to go back to painting works by hand. As TIME says, “plenty of people are waiting for him to fall on his face”. Perhaps. One thing for sure: if he does fall on his face, he has alot of money to cushion the blow.

(The photo is from an excellent photo essay in TIME that you can find here. In the photo above, Hirst “stands beside “The Kingdom”, a smaller scale reprise of the shark-in-formaldehyde piece that first made him famous, “The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living.” “)