I t all began on a London bus. “It was 2003 and I was on a Number 94 which went from Shepherds Bush along Holland Park and up through Notting Hill,” reca꧑lls Oliver Barker, Chairman of Sotheby’s Europe. “I was looking out of the window and I could see clearly that Pharmacy had shut down. Things were being moved outside the restaurant. And I just had this epiphany. That would be a really fantastic auction.”
Pharmacy – the restaurant and social hotspot styled as a dispensing chemist by Damie♕n Hirst and PR maestro Matthew Freud – had been an iconic destination for London society at the turn of the millennium. Kate Moss and Alexander McQueen frequented its pill-lined bar. “It was the high table of Cool Brita🐎nnia,” Barker notes.
The following year, Barker staged an auction of the restaurant’s fixtures, fittings, decorations and furniture – all created𒈔 by Hirst – the first time there had been an entire sale of works consigned by a living artist. It was as if an entire aesthetic was being auctioned – in addition to Hirst’s sculptural works and stained-glass windows, there were menus, lights, banister brackets, salt and pepper shakers and egg cups. All with Hirst’s Pop-medicinal theme.
It ca🔜used a sensation: the auction more thanꦜ doubled its pre-sale estimate, totalling £11.1 million. It created a new world auction record for Hirst and saw every single lot sold. Even a set of six ashtrays found a happy home – for an astounding £1,600. “Suddenly my restaurant venture seems to be a success,” Hirst remarked on the day.
But Pharmacy was just the beginning. The sale’s success had created a bond of trust between Hirst and Sotheby’s. “The greatest indication of the success of that relationship was that we did it again,” Barker says. Four years later Sotheby’s staged 168开奖官方开奖网站查询:Beautiful Inside My Head Forever, a two-day sale of pieces created by Hirst especially for the auction, delivered directly from the artist’s studio to the s🃏aleroom. This was a landmark move in an arena that had always focussed on the secondary market. By that stage Hirst had become a global phenomenon. “The stakes had got even higher,” Barker explains. “The values had become even more important.”
In three sale sessions, some 223 new works were offered to a capacity crowd and lines of phone banks. They covered the full gamut of Hirst’s imagination – in🌺cluding his butterfly works, medicine cabinets, formaldehyde boxes, spin paintings and skulls. The sale totalled £111.6 million. It was, Barker observes: “The biggest transformation in the auction business over the past 60 years.”
All artworks © Damien Hirst and Science (UK) Ltd.
