Hirst Selling Briskly and Well at Sotheby's
by Zoe Strimpel
Mon, 15 Sep 2008 at 4:37 PM
The sale the art world has been waiting for is at the midway point. Damien Hirst's gallery-shunning Sotheby's sale, "Beautiful Inside My Head Forever," has already busted through all the records this evening, with a 100% sale rate so far. At the time of writing, it has made £43,563,800 ($78,307,220), passing its pre-sale low estimate of £43.2 million ($77.6 million). "The Golden Calf," a gold-hoofed dead calf in formaldehyde with closed eyes, has gone for £10,345,250 ($18,598,130). "The Kingdom" (a formaldehyde-sunk tiger shark) has gone for £9,561,250 ($17,188,697). In the week or so that the exhibition has been up in advance of the sale, 21,000 people have passed through Sotheby's for a look.
I was one of them this morning. Within moments of entering the vast exhibit, my cynicism about Mr. Hirst and his dead animals, cigarette butts, flies, butterflies, medicine cabinets, and spots vanished. A great number of pieces are simply astoundingly beautiful, particularly the butterfly canvases, some of which are made in the image of cathedral stained-glass windows. Mr. Hirst deserves every penny he'll get from the sale and more.
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