Damien Hirst (born June 7, 1965, Bristol, UK) is an English artist, entrepreneur, art collector, and the most famous figure of the Young British Artists, dominating the art scene since the 1990s.

According to Sunday Times estimates, Hirst is the richest living artist in the world, with an estimated fortune of £ 215 million in 2010. At the beginning of his career, Damien worked closely with renowned collector Charles Saatchi, but growing disagreements led to a break in 2003.

Death is a central theme in his work. The artist's most famous series is Natural History: dead animals (including shark, sheep and cow) in formaldehyde. Signature work - "The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living": a tiger shark in an aquarium with formaldehyde. This work has become a symbol of the graphic work of British art of the 1990s and a symbol of Britart throughout the world.

Butterflies are one of the central objects for expressing Hirst's work, he uses them in all possible forms: images in paintings, photographs, installations. For example, he used 9,000 living butterflies for one of his installations In and Out of Love, which was held at Tate Modern from April to September 2012 in London, which gradually died during the event. After this incident, representatives of the RSPCA Animal Welfare Fund harshly criticized the artist.

In September 2008, Hirst sold the complete Beautiful Inside My Head Forever collection at Sotheby's for £ 111 million ($ 198 million), breaking the record for a single-artist auction.

Damien Hirst was born in Bristol and raised in Leeds. His father was a mechanic and car salesman, he left the family when Damien was 12 years old. His mother, Mary, was an amateur artist. She quickly lost control of her son, who was arrested twice for shoplifting. First, Damien studied at an art school in Leeds, then, after two years working on construction sites in London, he tried to enter the Central College of Art and Design named after St. Martin and some college in Wales. Eventually he was admitted to Goldsmiths College (1986-1989).

In the 1980s, Goldsmith College was considered groundbreaking: Unlike other schools, which attracted students who failed to enter a real college, Goldsmith School attracted many talented students and inventive teachers. Goldsmith introduced an innovative program that did not require students to draw or paint. Over the past 30 years, this model of education has become widespread throughout the world.

As a student at the school, Hirst regularly visited the morgue. Later, he will notice that many of the themes of his works originate there.

In July 1988, Hirst curated the acclaimed Freeze exhibition at the empty Port Authority Building in London's docks; the exhibition presented the works of 17 students of the school and his own creation - a composition of cardboard boxes painted with latex paints. The Freeze exhibition itself was also the fruit of Hirst's work. He selected the works himself, ordered the catalog and planned the opening ceremony.

Freeze was the starting point for several YBA artists; in addition, Charles Saatchi, a well-known collector and NATO propaganda curator, drew attention to Hirst.

Hirst graduated from Goldsmiths College in 1989. In 1990, together with friend Karl Friedman, he organized another exhibition, Gamble, in a hangar in an empty Bermondsey factory building. This exhibition was visited by Saatchi: Friedman recalls standing with his mouth open in front of Hirst's installation entitled A Thousand Years - a visual demonstration of life and death. Saatchi acquired this creation and offered Hirst money to create future works.

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Damien Hirst (born June 7, 1965, Bristol, UK) is an English artist, entrepreneur, art collector, and the most famous figure of the Young British Artists, dominating the art scene since the 1990s.

BIOGRAPHY OF THE ARTIST

Damien Hirst was born in Bristol and raised in Leeds. His father was a mechanic and car salesman, he left the family when Damien was 12 years old. His mother, Mary, was an amateur artist. She quickly lost control of her son, who was arrested twice for shoplifting.

First, Damien studied at an art school in Leeds, then, after two years working on construction sites in London, he tried to enter the Central College of Art and Design named after St. Martin and some college in Wales. Eventually, he was admitted to Goldsmiths College (1986-1989). In the 1980s, Goldsmith College was considered groundbreaking: unlike other schools, which attracted students who failed to enter a real college, Goldsmiths School attracted many talented students and resourceful teachers. Goldsmith introduced an innovative program that did not require students to draw or paint. Over the past 30 years, this model of education has become widespread throughout the world.

As a student at the school, Hirst regularly visited the morgue. Later, he will notice that many of the themes of his works originate there.

In July 1988, Hirst curated the acclaimed Freeze exhibition at the empty Port Authority Building in London's docks; the exhibition presented the works of 17 students of the school and his own creation - a composition of cardboard boxes painted with latex paints. The Freeze exhibition itself was also the fruit of Hirst's work. He selected the works himself, ordered the catalog and planned the opening ceremony.

Freeze was the starting point for several YBA artists; in addition, the famous collector and patron of the arts Charles Saatchi drew attention to Hirst. In 1989, Hirst graduated from Goldsmiths College.

In 1990, together with friend Karl Friedman, he organized another exhibition, Gamble, in a hangar in an empty Bermondsey factory building. This exhibition was visited by Saatchi: Friedman recalls how he stood with his mouth open in front of Hirst's installation entitled A Thousand Years - a visual demonstration of life and death. Saatchi acquired this creation and offered Hirst money to create future works.

Thus, with the money of Saatchi, in 1991, the "Physical impossibility of death in the mind of a living" was created, which is an aquarium with a tiger shark, the length of which reached 4.3 meters. The work cost Saatchi £ 50,000. The shark was caught by an authorized fisherman in Australia and was priced at £ 6,000. As a result, Hirst was nominated for the Turner Prize, which was awarded to Greenville Davey. The shark itself was sold in December 2004 to collector Steve Cohen for $ 12 million (£ 6.5 million).

Hirst's first international recognition came to the artist in 1993 at the Venice Biennale. His work Separated Mother and Child featured parts of a cow and a calf placed in separate formaldehyde aquariums. In 1997, the artist's autobiography I Want To Spend the Rest of My Life Everywhere, with Everyone, One to One, Always, Forever, Now was published.

Hirst's latest project, which made a lot of noise, is a life-size image of a human skull; the skull itself is copied from the skull of a European aged about 35 years old, who died somewhere between 1720 and 1910; the teeth are inserted into the skull. The creation is encrusted with 8601 industrial diamonds with a total weight of 1100 carats; they cover it like a pavement. In the center of the skull forehead is a large, 52.4-carat, standard brilliant-cut, pale pink diamond.

The sculpture is called For the Love of God and is the most expensive sculpture of a living author at £ 50 million.

CREATION

Death is a central theme in his work.

The artist's most famous series is Natural History: dead animals (including shark, sheep and cow) in formaldehyde. Significant work - "The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living": a tiger shark in a formaldehyde aquarium. This work has become a symbol of the graphic work of British art of the 1990s and a symbol of Britart throughout the world.

Unlike sculptures and installations, which practically do not deviate from the theme of death, Damien Hirst's painting at first glance looks cheerful, elegant and life-affirming. The main painting series of the artist are:

"Spots" - Spot paintings (1988 - until now) - a geometric abstraction of colored circles, usually of the same size, not repeating in color and arranged in a grid. In some jobs, these rules are not followed. As the names for most of the works in this series, the scientific names of various toxic, narcotic or stimulating substances are taken: "Aprotinin", "Butyrophenone", "Ceftriaxone", "Diamorphine", "Ergocalciferol", "Minoxidil", "Oxalacetic Acid", "Vitamin C "," Zomepirac "and the like.

"Rotations" - Spin paintings (1992 - until today) - painting in the genre of abstract expressionism. During the production of this series, the artist or his assistants pour or drip paint onto a rotating canvas.

"Butterflies" - Butterfly Color Paintings (1994-2008) - abstract assemblage. Paintings are created by gluing dead butterflies onto a freshly painted canvas (no glue is used, butterflies stick to the uncured paint themselves). At the same time, the canvas is uniformly painted over with one color, and the butterflies used have a complex, bright color.

"Kaleidoscopes" - Kaleidoscope Paintings (2001-2008) - here, using butterflies stuck close to each other, the artist creates symmetrical patterns, similar to the patterns of a kaleidoscope.

It's Great to Be Alive, 2002

Despite the fact that museums sometimes decorate their children's corners with paintings with Damien Hirst's butterflies, butterflies in the artist's work quite definitely play the role of symbols of death.

Butterflies are one of the central objects for expressing Hirst's work, he uses them in all possible forms: images in paintings, photographs, installations. So he used for one of his installations In and Out of Love, held at the Tate Modern from April to September 2012 in London, 9,000 living butterflies, which gradually died during the event. After this incident, representatives of the animal welfare charity RSPCA criticized the artist.

In September 2008, Hirst sold the complete Beautiful Inside My Head Forever at Sotheby's for £ 111 million ($ 198 million), breaking the record for a single-artist auction.

According to the Sunday Times, Hirst is the richest living artist in the world, with an estimated fortune of £ 215 million in 2010. Early in his career, Damien worked closely with renowned collector Charles Saatchi, but growing disagreements led to a breakup in 2003.

In 2011, Hirst designed the cover of the Red Hot Chili Peppers' album I’m with you.

In 2007, the work For the Love of God (a platinum skull inlaid with diamonds) was sold through the White Cube gallery to a group of investors for a record $ 100 million for living artists. True, there is information that among the so-called investors ”more than 70% of the assets belong to Hirst himself and his partners. So this work was sold no more than a third.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

• Tomkins K. "The Lives of Artists". - M .: V-A-C press, 2013

When writing this article, materials from the following sites were used:ru.wikipedia.org ,

If you find inaccuracies or want to supplement this article, send us information by email [email protected]site, we and our readers will be very grateful to you.

It was he who came up with the idea of \u200b\u200bencrusting human skulls with diamonds and making art objects from the corpses of cows. Damien Hirst (Damien Hirst) is a British artist and collector who first rose to prominence in the late 1980s. Member of the Young British Artists group, considered the most expensive artist in the world and the richest in the UK by The Sunday Times (2010). His works are included in the collections of many museums and galleries: Tate, Museum of Modern Art in New York, Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, Ulrecht Central Museum, etc.
Damien Hirst was born on June 7, 1965 in Bristol, UK. Most of his childhood was spent in Leeds. After his parents divorced, when Damien was 12 years old, he began to lead a freer lifestyle and was arrested twice for petty theft. However, Hirst was fond of drawing from childhood and graduated from the Art College in Leeds, and later continued his studies at Goldsmith College, University of London (1986-1989). Some of his drawings were made in the morgue; the theme of death later became the main one in the artist's work. Damien Hirst is in a civil marriage with designer Maya Norman, the couple have three sons. Hirst spends most of his time with his family at his home in Devon in the north of England. Dream, 2008 Anthem, 2000 In 1988 Damien Hirst organized an exhibition of Goldsmith students (Richard and Simon Pattersons, Sara Lucas, Fiona Rae, Angus Fairhurst and others, later called "Young British Artists") Freeze, which attracted public attention. Here, the famous collector Charles Saatchi noticed the artists and, above all, Hirst. Lost Love, 2000 In 1990 Damien Hirst took part in the Modern Medicine and Gambler exhibitions. He presented his work “A Thousand Years” on them: a glass container with a cow's head covered with cadaveric flies, this work was bought by Saatchi. From that time on, Damien and the collector began to work closely until 2003. “I will die - and I want to live forever. I cannot escape death, and I cannot get rid of the desire to live. I want to at least catch a glimpse of what it is like to die " In 1991, Hirst's first personal exhibition In and Out of Love took place in London, and in 1992 - an exhibition of Young British Artists at the Saatchi Gallery, where Hirst's work "The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of the Living" was presented: a tiger shark in formaldehyde. This work simultaneously brought the artist fame, even among those who are far from art, and a nomination for the Turner Prize. In 1993, Hirst took part in the Venice Biennale with his work Mother and Child Divided, and a year later he curated the exhibition Some Went Mad, Some Ran Away, where he presented his composition The Lost Sheep (dead sheep in formaldehyde), which was renamed Black Sheep when the artist poured ink into the aquarium. In 1995 Damien Hirst received the Turner Prize. At the same time, the artist presented the installation Two Fucking and Two Watching, representing a decaying cow and a bull. In subsequent years, Hirst's exhibitions were held in London, Seoul, Salzburg. In 1997, Hirst's autobiographical book I Want to Spend the Rest of My Life Everywhere, with Everyone, One to One, Always, Forever, Now was published. In 2000, the work "Anthem", shown at the Art Noise exhibition, was acquired by Saatchi, the sculpture was an anatomical model of the human body over six meters high. In the same year, the exhibition "Damien Hirst: Models, Methods, Approaches, Assumptions, Results and Findings" was held, which was attended by about 100 thousand people, all of Hirst's sculptures were sold. Self-portrait: "Kill you, Demien" In 2004, one of Hirst's most famous works - "The physical impossibility of death in the mind of a living" - Saatchi sold to another collector, Steve Cohen. Its cost was $ 12 million. “It's very easy to say, 'Well, even I could do that.' The fact is that "I did it" In 2007 Damien Hirst presented his work “For the love of God - a human skull, covered with platinum and studded with diamonds, only teeth are natural. It was bought by a group of shareholders (including Hirst himself) for £ 50 million (or $ 100 million), while the artist himself spent £ 14 million on it. Thus, “For the Love of God” is the most expensive work of art by a living artist. "Invest Banker in Formaldehyde" Hirst is also engaged in painting, some of his most famous works are the triptychs "Meaning Nothing", executed in the manner of Francis Bacon (some of them were sold before the opening of the 2009 exhibition), the Spots series (multicolored dots on white background, reminiscent of pop art), Spins (concentric circles), Butterflies (canvases using butterfly wings).
Damien Hirst also acts as a designer: in 2009 he used his painting "Beautiful, Father Time, Hypnotic, Exploding Vortex, The Hours Painting" for the cover of the album "See the Light" of the British band The Hours, and in 2011 he came up with cover for the album Red Hot Chili Peppers "I'm with You". He also collaborated with Levi’s, ICA and Supreme and designed magazine covers (including Pop, Tar and Garage). Hirst collector owns a collection of paintings by Jeff Koons, Andy Warhol, Francis Bacon, Tracey Emin. Tar Magazine Spring / Summer 2009 (Design by Damien Hirst, Model Kate Moss Garage Magazine Fall / Winter 2011/2012 (Photo by Edie Slimane, Design by Damien Hirst, Model Lily Donaldson) Pop Magazine Cover, Fall / Winter 2009/2010 (Photo by Jamie Morgan, Design by Damien Hirst, Model Tavi Gevinson) Red Hot Chili Peppers' album cover "I’m with You" (2011) Clothes by Damien Damien Hirst X Supreme Skateboard Series, 2011 Work * In and Out of Love (1991), installation. * The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living (1991), a tiger shark in a formalin aquarium. It was one of the works nominated for the Turner Prize. * Pharmacy] (1992), life-size reproduction of a pharmacy. * Away from the Flock (1994), a dead sheep in formaldehyde. * Some Comfort Gained from the Acceptance of the Inherent Lies in Everything (1996) installation.
* Mother and Child Divided * "For the Love of God", (2007) D. Hirst's records * In 2007, the work "For the love of God" (platinum skull encrusted with diamonds) was sold through the "White Cube" gallery to a group of investors for a record sum of $ 100 million for living artists.

His father was a mechanic and car salesman, he left his family when Damien was 12. His mother was a Catholic consulting bureau and an amateur artist. She quickly lost control of her son, who was arrested twice for shoplifting. Damien Hirst attended art college in Leeds, studied art at the university in London.

Hirst has had serious drug and alcohol problems for ten years, starting in the early nineties.

Death is a central theme in his work. The artist's most famous series are dead animals in formalin (shark, sheep, cow ...)

One of his first works was the installation "A Thousand Years" - a visual demonstration of life and death. In a glass showcase, fly larvae emerged from the eggs to crawl behind the glass partition to the food - a rotting cow's head. The flies hatched from the larvae, which then died on the exposed wires of the "electronic fly swatter". A visitor could watch A Thousand Years today, and then come back a few days later and see how the cow's head shrank during that time and a pile of dead flies grew.

At forty, Hirst "was worth" £ 100 million, that is, more than Picasso, Warhol and Dali at this age combined

In 1991, Hirst created "The physical impossibility of death in the mind of a living" (tiger shark in a formaldehyde aquarium)
"I like it when an object symbolizes a feeling. The shark is scary, it is bigger than you and is in an environment that is unfamiliar to you. When it is dead, it looks like it is alive, and when it is alive, it is like dead." Sold for $ 12 million

A canned sheep cut lengthwise. A creature "frozen in death". Expresses "the joy of life and the inevitability of death." Sold for £ 2.1million

"Mother and Child Separated". You can walk between them. In 1995, Hirst received the Turner Prize for her. In 1999, he turned down an invitation to represent Britain at the Venice Biennale.

Hirst had a big "medical" series. At a show in Mexico City, the president of a vitamin company paid $ 3 million for the Blood of Christ, an installation of paracetamol tablets in a medical cabinet. "Spring Lullaby" - a locker with 6136 pills spread out on razor blades went to Christie's auction for $ 19.1 million

LSD
Hirst's third major series - "dot pictures" - colored circles on a white background. The master indicated which paints to use, but did not touch the canvas himself. In 2003, his dot pattern was used as an instrument calibration on the British Beagle spacecraft launched to Mars.

The fourth series - paintings of rotation - are created on a rotating pottery wheel. Hirst stands on a stepladder and throws paint onto a rotating base - canvas or board. Sometimes he commands the assistant: "More red" or "Turpentine"
Pictures "are a visual representation of the energy of the random"

Collage of thousands of individual tropical butterfly wings created by technicians in a separate studio

An interesting story happened to a reporter who had an old portrait of Stalin, which he once bought for 200 pounds. In 2007, he approached Christie with a proposal to put it up for auction. The auction house refused, saying that it did not trade in either Stalin or Hitler.
- What if the author was Hirst or Warhol?
- Well then we would love to take it
The reporter called Hirst and asked him to paint a red nose for Stalin. He did so and added his signature.
Christie sold the work for 140 thousand pounds

Text: Ksyusha Petrova

Gary Tatintsyan Gallery opens in Moscow today the first exhibition since 2006 by Damien Hirst - a British artist who is not in vain called "great and terrible", comparing it with the geniuses of the Renaissance, then with sharks from Wall Street. Hirst is considered the richest living author, which only fuels controversy around his work. Since Charles Saatchi was literally staring at the installation A Thousand Years with an open mouth - a spectacular and gloomy illustration of the entire life's journey from birth to death - the noise around the creative methods and aesthetic value of Hirst's works has not subsided, which the artist himself, of course, is only happy about ... We tell why Hirst's works are really worthy of the enormous attention that they get, and we try to understand the inner world artist - much more ambiguous and subtle than it might seem from the outside.

"Away from the Flock", 1994

Hirst is now fifty-one, and ten years ago he completely gave up smoking, drugs and alcohol - chances are good that his career will continue for several decades. At the same time, it is difficult to imagine what could be the next step of an artist of this magnitude - Hirst already represented his country at the opening ceremony of the London Olympics, shot a video for the Blur group, made the world's most expensive work of art (a platinum skull inlaid with diamonds), in workshops on more than one hundred and sixty employees work for him (this was never even dreamed of by Andy Warhol with his "Factory"), and his fortune exceeds a billion dollars. The brawler's image that made Hirst famous, along with his series of alcohol-treated animals in the 1990s, gradually changed to a more relaxed one: although the artist still loves leather pants and rings with skulls, he has not shown his penis to strangers for a long time, as he did in the “years of military glory ”, And looks more and more like a successful entrepreneur than a rock star, although in fact it is both.

Hirst explains his extraordinary commercial success by the fact that he had more motivation to earn than the rest of the members of the Young British Artists association he headed (even while studying at Goldsmiths, Hirst organized the legendary Freeze exhibition, which attracted the attention of eminent gallery owners to young artists ). Hirst's childhood cannot be called wealthy and happy: he never saw his biological father, his stepfather left the family when the boy was twelve, and his Catholic mother desperately resisted her son's attempts to become a part of the then very young punk subculture.

Nevertheless, she supported his studies in art - perhaps out of despair, because Hirst was a difficult teenager and all subjects, except drawing, were given to him with difficulty. Damien was regularly caught on petty shoplifting and other unpleasant stories, but at the same time he managed to sketch in the local morgue and study medical atlases, which were the source of inspiration for his favorite author, the dark expressionist Francis Bacon. Bacon's paintings greatly influenced Hirst: the grin of the famous alcoholized shark resembles the motif of Bacon's mouth, which is repeated in Bacon, while rectangular aquariums are constantly found on Bacon's canvases and pedestals.

A few years ago, Hirst, who had never entered the field of traditional painting, presented to the public a series of his own paintings, clearly inspired by the works of Bacon, and failed miserably: critics called Hirst's new works a pathetic parody of the master's paintings and compared them with “the daub of a freshman who does not give high hopes ". Perhaps these caustic reviews hurt the artist's feelings, but clearly did not affect his productivity: with the help of assistants who perform all the routine work, Hirst continues his endless series of paintings with multi-colored dots, "rotating" paintings created by scrolling cans of paint in a centrifuge, installations with tablets and on an industrial scale produces great-selling works.

← "Untitled AAA", 1992

Although Hirst has always said that money is primarily a vehicle for the production of art on a large scale, it cannot be denied that he possesses an extraordinary talent for entrepreneurship - equal, if not superior in scale, to artistic talent. Not distinguished by modesty Briton believes that everything he touches turns into gold - and this seems to be true: even in the depressed 2008, the two-day auction of his works at Sotheby’s, organized by Hirst himself, surpassed all expectations and broke the Picasso auction record. Hirst, who looks like a simple guy from Leeds, does not hesitate to make money on objects that seem to be alien to high art - be it souvenir skateboards for six thousand dollars or the trendy London restaurant "Pharmacy", decorated in the spirit of the artist's "pharmacy" series. Not only Oxford graduates from good families, but also a new layer of collectors - those who came out of the lower classes and made a fortune from scratch, like the artist himself.

Hirst's star status and the dizzying cost of his work often make it difficult to discern their essence - which is annoying, because the ideas embedded in them are no less impressive than sawed cow carcasses in formaldehyde. Even in what seems to be one hundred percent kitsch, Hirst has an irony: his famous diamond-studded skull, which sold for one hundred million dollars, is called "For the Love of God" (an expression that can be literally translated as "In the name of the love of God" is used as a curse of a tired person: "Well, for God's sake!"). According to the artist, he was prompted to create this work by the words of his mother, who once asked: "God have mercy, what are you going to do next?" ("For the love of God, what are you going to do next?"). Cigarette butts, laid out with manic pedantry in a showcase, are a way of calculating the life time: like animals in formalin, and a diamond skull, referring to the classic plot of memento mori, smoked cigarettes remind of the frailty of existence, which our minds cannot grasp with all our desire. And multi-colored mugs, and cigarette butts, and shelves with medicines - an attempt to streamline what separates us from death, to express the severity of being in this body and in this consciousness, which can break off at any moment.

"Claustrophobia / Agoraphobia", 2008

In his interviews, Hirst increasingly says that in his youth he felt eternal, and now the topic of death for him has many other nuances. “Mate, my oldest son, Connor, is sixteen. Several of my friends have already died, and I am getting old, - the artist explains. "I'm not the bastard who tried to yell at the whole world anymore." A convinced atheist, Hirst regularly returns to religious subjects, ruthlessly dissecting them and stating over and over again that the existence of God is impossible, just like "death in the mind of the living."

A series of works with live and dead butterflies embody the artist's thoughts about beauty and its fragility. This idea is most clearly expressed in the installation "In and Out of Love": several thousand butterflies hatch from cocoons, live and die in the gallery space, and their bodies adhered to the canvases remain as a reminder of the fragility of beauty. Like the works of the old masters, it is desirable to see Hirst's works at least once live: both the memetic "Physical impossibility of death in the mind of a living", and "Separated mother and child" make a completely different impression if you are standing next to them. These and other works from the "Natural History" series are not a provocation for the sake of provocation, but a thoughtful and lyrical statement about the fundamental issues of human existence.

As Hirst himself says, in art, as in everything we do, there is only one idea - the search for an answer to the main questions of philosophy: where did we come from, where are we going and is there any sense in this? A shark in alcohol, inspired by Hirst's childhood memories of the horror "Jaws", confronts our consciousness with a paradox: why do we feel uncomfortable next to the carcass of a deadly animal, because we know that it cannot harm us? Isn't what we feel is one of the manifestations of an irrational fear of death that always looms somewhere on the edge of consciousness - and if so, how does this affect our actions and daily life?

Hirst has been criticized more than once for his creative methods and harsh statements: for example, in 2002, the artist had to make a public apology for comparing the 9/11 attack to an artistic process. The living classic condemned Hirst for not doing the work with his own hands, but using the work of assistants, and critic Julian Spaulding even coined the parody term "Con Art", which can be translated as "conceptualism for suckers." It cannot be said that all the outraged exclamations against Hirst were groundless: the artist was more than once convicted of plagiarism, and was also accused of artificially raising prices for his works, not to mention the statements of the Society for the Protection of Animal Rights, which was worried about the conditions of keeping butterflies in the museum ... Perhaps the most absurd conflict associated with the name of the scandalous Briton is his confrontation with the sixteen-year-old artist Cartraine, who was selling collages with a photograph of Hirst's work "In the Name of the Love of God." The multimillionaire artist sued the teenager for two hundred pounds, which he earned on his collages, which caused violent outrage among the representatives of the art market.

← "Enchanted", 2008

Hirst's conceptualism is not as soulless as it might seem: indeed, the artist gives birth to an idea, and dozens of his nameless assistants are engaged in the implementation - however, practice shows that Hirst really cares about the fate of his works. The case of the very alcoholized shark that began to decompose has become one of the favorite anecdotes of the art world. Charles Saatchi decided to save the job by stretching the skin of the long-suffering fish on an artificial frame, but Hirst rejected the converted work, saying that it no longer makes such a frightening impression. As a result, the already damaged installation was sold for twelve million dollars, but at the insistence of the artist, the shark was replaced.

Hirst's friend and YBA associate Matt Collishaw describes him as a “hooligan and esthete,” and if everything is clear with the hooligan part, then the aesthetic side is often forgotten: perhaps, Hirst's extraordinary artistic flair can be appreciated only in exhibitions of works from his extensive