to and fro

At $100,000 per night, the Palms Damien Hirst suite is the most expensive hotel room in the world. 

Under the same Palms roof is the reasonable all you can eat buffet featured here: 

could go either way

A Hirst interview here. 

"All the greatest ideas are simple."
- Damien Hirst

and Warhol

Peter Paul Rubens, The Four Philosophers

"[He made money] by following Jeff Koons's and Damien Hirst's template - and incidentally, Rubens's and Rembrandt's: he maintained an art factory."
- Steve Martin, An Object of Beauty, p.113

Lullaby, the Seasons, 2002 (detail)
Damien Hirst began making medicine cabinets while still an art student.

oblivious bidding

"IN 2008 just over $270m-worth of art by Damien Hirst was sold at auction, a world record for a living artist. By 2009 Mr Hirst’s annual auction sales had shrunk by 93%—to $19m—and the 2010 total is likely to be even lower. The collapse in the Hirst market can partly be ascribed to the recession."

The Economist article here.

definition

Damien Hirst, Zebra in Formaldehyde

"To be art it must have no purpose other than itself; no function."
- Tate Modern

bad boy

"Damien had this idea for a piece where he was going to have his hands surgically removed and then, you know, sewn back on. It was mad but he was dead set on it. We found this doctor in Mexico who was going to do it, but luckily, he decided against it."

- Dave Stewart [born 1952] in the September 2009 edition of Fast Company, pg.73

Warhol into Disney

About a recent visit to the Warhol Factory Exhibition at the Waterloo Children's Museum:

When one enters the Children's Museum, one is dwarfed by an empty cavernous lobby atrium.

I asked the cashier clerk how long it would take me to complete the museum tour. How long is a piece of string. She said about an hour. I took the elevator up to where the exhibit begins on the fourth floor. I was greeted warmly and with an enthusiastic handshake by Steve the Security Guard. I've been in galleries and museums all over the world and this has never happened before. Including when I visited Warhol's Pittsburgh installation where the guards were perhaps trained to imitate unmoving stone.

The scale of the Pittsburgh museum is vast covering seven high-ceilinged floors. Many of the most impressive works there would not squeeze into Kitchener's comparatively tight exhibit spaces, unless the atrium was utilized. I quickly discovered that in Kitchener, Warhol's work is currently limited to the fourth floor. It could expand when a dinosaur display on the third floor is retired.

Of all the several dozen works on the fourth floor, perhaps fifty-percent are by other artists rendering their interpretations of Warhol works.

Critically, there was no mention of Richard Hamilton who founded Pop Art and who was a significant early Warhol influence; in Pittsburgh, a full wall on the ground floor is dedicated to Hamilton. Neither did I see even a small reference to Damien Hirst, who is the direct inheritor of Warhol's Factory approach and who is the most financially successful artist of our time. Hirst personifies Warhol's painted dollar signs.

How long is a piece of string? My tour lasted 15 minutes.

Andy Warhol said that "You have to be willing to get happy about nothing." You can buy this quotation and others on small silk-screened panels for $20 in the museum merchandise area on the fourth floor [it's not really a gift shop]. 

After visiting the Kitchener museum, I would add that "You have to be willing to get happy about next to nothing."

Previous references to Warhol and the Children's Museum here and here.

Oxlade

You've heard of Hirst, Emin and Banksy but what about one of Britain's finest modern artists, Roy Oxlade? If you want to beat the credit crunch by investing in art or spend your last few quid on some beautiful cards, have a look here.

For The Love of God

"Death is such a heavy subject, it would be good to make something that laughed in the face of it.”

- Damien Hirst [born 1965]

Hirst's "For The Love of God" is a life-size cast of a human skull in platinum and covered by 8,601 pave-set diamonds weighing 1,106.18 carats. Made for £14m for and sold recently for £50m; said to be the most expensive piece of contemporary art. The original skull was examined by forensic experts, who concluded that it was male, probably of European origin and about 35 years old at the time of death. Radiocarbon analysis suggests that he lived some time between 1720 and 1810.

A factory hustler fleecing rich idiots?