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On the walls of the Albertina Modern, one of Vienna’s most venerable art museums, is a simple pencil drawing of a small cabinet and a medicine bottle. Scrawled down the side and across the top is a list of words and phrases including “God”, “Anarchy”, “Bollocks” and “You’re only 29. You’ve got a lot to learn”. I’m at an exhibition of Damien Hirst’s drawings, a retrospective of his work from 1987, when he was still an art student, to the present — but it’s much more than that. What I’m looking at is a portal into the artist’s brain and thinking processes.
A couple of days later I’m plunging deeper into that portal when I meet Hirst on Zoom. He’s in a nondescript hotel room with dark furniture and white bed linen. Not particularly fancy, for Britain’s reportedly richest living artist. Where is he?
One of the pieces at the Vienna exhibition PHOTOGRAPHED BY RAINER IGLAR. © DAMIEN HIRST AND SCIENCE LTD. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED, DACS 2025 “Las Vegas. London’s a bit depressing at the moment and my partner [the former ballerina Sophie Cannell] likes it here. We’ve got a new baby, Noah, and they have loads of mother and baby meetings.” The former enfant terrible of the Britart scene turns 60 next month and I find him in reflective mood. Over the course of almost two hours, we discuss life, death, money, giving up drinking, parenthood, snooker and how to put a value on art. The conversation takes a particularly surreal turn when Hirst tells me about his “posthumous drawings” — instructions for art that can be made and sold in his name up to 200 years after his death, to be signed by his descendants. As with everything Hirst does, it’s not always easy to tell whether he’s serious or having a laugh. Hirst with The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living (1991) PHOTOGRAPHED BY PRUDENCE CUMING ASSOCIATES LTD. © DAMIEN HIRST AND SCIENCE LTD. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED, DACS 2025 The Sunday Times critic Waldemar Januszczak has argued in these pages that without Hirst there would be no Tate Modern, no YBAs, no Cool Britannia. He was a second-year undergraduate in the late 1980s when he curated his first exhibition, Freeze, featuring the work of 16 fellow Goldsmiths students in a disused building in Docklands in London. It caught the attention of Charles Saatchi, who sold off his collection of postwar American art to invest in Hirst and his mates. Saatchi went on to mount a series of shows in the early 1990s, including Hirst’s seminal work, The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living. The dead shark in a tank of formaldehyde caught the attention of the world, and the rest was art history. • How it all went wrong for Damien Hirst Hirst recalls his frustration with the scene that preceded the Britart movement in the 1990s. “The fashion was for Untitled Number Three, and I hated it. I thought art had lost its way since the Fifties or Sixties, and it needed to be brought back.” Away from the Flock (1994) PHOTOGRAPHED BY PRUDENCE CUMING ASSOCIATES. LTD, © DAMIEN HIRST AND SCIENCE LTD He remains a great believer in the power of titles, and his ability to make headlines brought contemporary art to a much wider audience. “I used to love getting cab drivers who would say, ‘Are you that Damien Hirst geezer?’ And when I said, yeah, they’d say, ‘I went to see your dead sheep and it was quite good.’” He has long attracted controversy, from accusations of plagiarism to his art factories employing hundreds of assistants to his sale of digital art in 2022, aptly entitled The Currency, which many saw as a get-rich-quick scheme. More recently, the Guardian reported that three installations, featuring a dove, a shark and two calves in formaldehyde, had been backdated to the 1990s, when in fact they were made in 2017. Hirst’s response was that he had had the idea in the early 1990s and since they are works of conceptual art, that was what counted. In that, he’s no different than Andy Warhol or Jeff Koons. With Tracey Emin in 2010 DAVE M BENETT/GETTY IMAGES Despite a fortune estimated in the hundreds of millions, Hirst has not joined the establishment in the same way as some of his fellow YBAs (Dame Rachel Whiteread, Dame Tracey Emin). He is not a Royal Academician and tells me he even regrets accepting the Turner prize in 1995, because “art is so hard to judge and there’s no real criteria for picking winners”. • Tracey Emin: ‘Alcohol wasn’t good for my personality or my work’ Did he turn down a knighthood? Hirst hesitates. “Sort of. But they’re very clever — they don’t really offer it to you before getting someone to sound you out.” In his case it was the banker and art collector Jacob Rothschild. “He used to come down to my house and my studio. I enjoyed hanging out with him.” One day Rothschild rang and offered Hirst a CBE and when he rejected that, floated a KBE. After talking to his gallerist, Jay Jopling, Hirst still turned it down. Why? “I never felt comfortable with the idea.” When I ask where home is, Hirst struggles to answer. For many years it was a farmhouse in Devon, but he says his three elder sons have “stolen it” so now he’s had to institute a booking system. He also has houses in Mayfair, Richmond and the Cotswolds. “I used to buy everything. It was a bit like Monopoly — when you land on it, you buy it. Every time I went on holiday, I’d buy the villa I was staying in.” With his partner, Sophie Cannell DAVE M BENETT/GETTY IMAGES He used to spend a lot of time in Mexico, where he owns several properties, but Cannell, his 31-year-old girlfriend of eight years, doesn’t like going. “She hates spiders, and we get tarantulas, scorpions. I even had a crocodile in the pool, so that’s off the cards.” Hirst likes money and doesn’t mind talking about it — one reason he comes in for so much criticism. The myth of the impoverished artist painting in a draughty garret is a powerful one. “I just think money is an important thing in the world that we live in,” he explains. “You must keep up with the market and avoid making loads of work that never sells. But I now have a great business manager who thinks about it too and we throw ideas at each other.” Growing up in a working-class family in Leeds, Hirst’s first trading experience was helping his mother on her market stall selling bric-a-brac. “My mum also painted and she encouraged me to draw. As soon as I finished one piece of paper, she’d hand me another.” He also credits his art teacher, who ran the school theatre group too. The young Damien briefly considered a career in acting after playing Bottom in a school production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, before choosing art school instead. “I thought, I don’t want to pretend to be other people. I just want to be myself.” Another influence was repeated visits to the Leeds Museum during shopping trips with his mum. “Upstairs they had an art gallery showing Peter Blake, Francis Bacon, and then downstairs there was an aquarium, butterflies, things in formaldehyde and a giant Bengal tiger. Natural history museums are accessible to anyone of any class and kids love them — it’s all about wonder. Whereas some art museums can feel like they’re looking down their noses.” The Currency (2022) ISABEL INFANTES/AFP/GETTY IMAGES At the height of his fame, Hirst employed 350 people.“Now I’m down to about 150, but I’m making three or four times the amount of art,” he says, speaking like a true businessman. He says he has learnt a huge amount about the commercial side in the past few years. “When I started out, I thought being across the business stuff would take away from the art, but I’ve come to enjoy it.” We are talking about whether Hirst sees himself as a chief executive when he says: “And I’ve got a therapist as well.” I am momentarily thrown before he explains:“I used to talk to my therapist about my relationships, but I’ve moved on to talking about the art world and my frustrations at being an employer — how to deal with my employees and the stuff they complain about.” That sounds a bit like an executive coach. “Well, I was really struggling with how to get the people who work for me to do what I want. And she said, ‘I think the problem you’ve got is to do with ‘the sacred’. When you go look at [paintings by] Velázquez, you agree they’re sacred objects. The people who work for you need to believe that they work for a sacred artist, making sacred objects.’” For the Love of God (2007) PHOTOGRAPHED BY PRUDENCE CUMING ASSOCIATES. LTD, © DAMIEN HIRST AND SCIENCE LTD. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED, DACS/ARTIMAGE 2025 Hirst is still trying to make sense of the vagaries of the art market.“Paintings are the strangest thing, because we all know they cost nothing to make. Maybe £200 to make a canvas, stretch it, and then £500 on paints and a few brushes. But if a Picasso is sold for £150 million, we believe in it. We never ask, ‘How much did he spend on canvas?’ But if I do the diamond skull [For the Love of God, 2007], they become super-suspicious: how much were the diamonds? If they cost £12 million, how can you sell it for £50 million?” For the Love of God was sold in 2007 to an unnamed consortium that included Hirst; in later interviews he has implied that a sale did not take place. I quote Hirst a2022 New York Times article that argued he was no longer the force he once was in the art market, and that collectors are more interested in emerging names. Does that worry him? “Sales are still good for me. I’ve got friends who can’t sell any of their art. Obviously, I’ve gone through periods where I’ve got really high prices, like the Sotheby’s auction, which was insane.” • Are London’s grand auction houses in trouble? In September 2008 Hirst bypassed his established galleries (who normally take a 50 per cent cut) and sold 218 artworks at auction. It was a highly unusual move, which made the artist almost £200 million over two days. It was in the same week that the world’s financial markets crashed, so his timing was extremely fortunate. “It was fairytale stuff and gave me a lot of confidence. I think currently a lot of my works are selling for half the price.” I ask about supply and demand. For instance, if you flood the market with your spot paintings, aren’t they worth less? Not necessarily, is the answer, but it’s complicated. He got the original idea from On Kawara, a Japanese conceptual artist who painted an endless series of numerical dates on canvas. “So I had an idea of a machine that makes paintings, and it’s infinite. It just keeps making them.” Around that time, he was flying into Los Angeles and saw endless swimming pools below. “I thought, ‘All those people with a swimming pool can probably afford one of my spot paintings, so maybe there’s not too many.’” He was right. Hirst’s colourful canvases became a must for Hollywood producers and hedge funders to hang in their many homes. • Damien Hirst: I spot good ideas and steal them Another inspiration for the spot paintings was snooker. “I used to watch Pot Black on a black-and-white TV with my nan.” Years later, he met the snooker champion Ronnie O’Sullivan and the pair became close friends. “I’ve made a couple of paintings for Ronnie. He teaches me snooker, and I teach him how to paint.” Ronnie O’Sullivan paints? “Yeah, he comes into my studio. It’s brilliant. The last time I went to see him in his dressing room, he had a big thing of felt tip pens and he was doing dots on pieces of paper.” In the past few years Hirst has gone back to painting himself. he has been making huge floral paintings in oil, daubed on thick, using tiny dots of colour to build up massive cherry blossom trees, fields of flowers and cityscapes. But he’s not producing as many of these. “I can feel there’s a big turn in the art market, with all the uncertainty in the world. I’ve reduced the size of the series. With the cherry blossoms, I made 100. Now I’m thinking I should make a series of 60 or 40 instead.” Beautiful That’s No Immaculate Conception Drawing (2008) PHOTOGRAPHED BY CAROL WINKEL © DAMIEN HIRST AND SCIENCE LTD. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED, BILDRECHT, VIENNA 2025 Does turning 60 bother him? “Not really. I’m lucky because you can spend your whole life making art. There is no retirement day.” He is not going to have a party because he doesn’t really enjoy them since he gave up drink and drugs. He spent the first two decades of his career “crawling all over London, celebrating. I once said to Alex James from Blur, ‘But what about the glory years?’ And he just looked at me and went, ‘What glory years? It was a nightmare.’” Hirst spent six years trying to stop, “waking up in the morning feeling bad, horrible enough to have a drink at 11am”. Did quitting change him as an artist? “I just didn’t believe that life would be better sober but every single aspect of my life is better, including making art.” One of his motivations was to be a better father. Hirst told Desert Island Discs that he’d rather have “Dad” on his gravestone than “Artist”. As he approaches his seventh decade he worries about “my boys inheriting a nightmare, so I’m really looking at how to get my affairs in order”. His sons are all more into music than art, he says, although baby Noah is showing early interest: Hirst proudly shows me a photo of a cherubic-looking toddler fiercely concentrating on drawing with a colour pencil. In the meantime, he is playing around with the idea of his art continuing after his death. Hirst plans to fill 200 notebooks with drawings and ideas, each one representing a year after his death. “My manager calls them the preposterous paintings, because I call them posthumous paintings. “He suggested we could sell them now, which is a bit of a mind f*** . The idea is to have a certificate that says ‘Year One after Damien Dies: you’ve got the right to make this sculpture and you can trade the certificate before it isn’t made.’” Some of the drawings will be historic. “I had an idea for a sculpture of a piggy in formaldehyde back in 1991 that I never made. So, if that was in book 145 you could make that pig [145 years after his death] and date it 1991.” So he’d be selling art futures, in the same way traders sell commodities futures? “If it works, yes,” he says with a mischievous smile. And given that Hirst’s entire career has been built on chutzpah, he might just carry it off. As we say goodbye he lifts his arm to show me a bandage around his arm and shoulder. Is it broken? No, he says, he dislocated it in the sea in Thailand, on a recent holiday. “It’s really horrific. I had surgery out there, and now I’ve torn this other muscle.” Is he still able to paint? “Yeah, I paint with anything. And I paint with my assistant, of course.” Damien Hirst: Drawings is at the Albertina Modern, Vienna, to Oct 12, albertina.at What will the legacy of Damien Hirst and the YBAs be? Share your thoughts in the comments below
