You don’t need a degree in media studies to figure out what’s behind the
timing of Damien Hirst’s first big exhibition in Hollywood. Brit Art’s
biggest superstar opens a new show of paintings, Superstition, at the fancy
Gagosian Gallery in Beverly Hills on Thursday, just three days before the
Academy Awards. Hirst and the gallery’s owner, Larry “Go-Go” Gagosian, both
masters of media manipulation, will be counting on Hummer-loads of A-listers
making the pilgrimage. “Gagosian has impeccable antennae,” says Edward
Goldman,a prominent LA art critic. “All the stars in town for the Oscars
will want to be there. It is going to be a huge media event.” Fresh from
their preOscar makeovers, the stars will hustle to prove their cultural
credentials by being photographed in front of Hirst’s 28 butterfly paintings
in the 8,000 sq ft, Richard Meier-designed modernist gallery. Even if they
have never heard of Philip Larkin. Hirst’s huge new paintings, evocative of
stained-glass church windows, have the pretension of having two titles each,
one taken from Larkin’s High Windows collection of poetry.
When I went to the gallery last weekend, the large front windows were
obscured by giant wooden crates. I could just spy part of one large
butterfly painting, leaning against a wall. Hirst had flown into town for a
couple of days from his beachfront home in Mexico to oversee the hanging of
the show — which had been “painted” by his team of assistants — and for
interviews with local press. (Hirst cancelled a planned interview with me at
the last moment, insisting he didn’t want to do any British press. Gagosian
was also not available to talk about the show.)
So, pretending to represent foreign collectors, I phoned the gallery to ask
about the show. There were 28 works, I was told, each consisting of hundreds
of butterflies on paint, some circular, some rectangular, ranging in size
from 84in x 72in to 115in x 96in; the circular paintings were 96in in
diameter. Prices range from $900,000 (£463,000) to $2.5m. In the current
white-hot art market, I was expecting the show to be sold out, and was
surprised to be told by the eager assistant that there were “still several
works available”.
One frustration of not being able to talk to Hirst was that I couldn’t ask
the question to which many people suspect they already know the answer: “Do
you plan to use this show to ‘go Hollywood’?” Making movies may be the only
mountain left to climb for the 41-year-old artist. If he does start using
celluloid as an artistic medium, he will be taking his cue from previous
generations — artists such as Marcel Duchamp and Man Ray — but also from his
most obvious precursor, Andy Warhol, who used movie-making to delineate his
collisions between art and celebrity. Leading artists arealready making
films. Julian Schnabel has directed three well-regarded works: Basquiat,
about the late New York painter; Before Night Falls, about the Cuban poet
Rein-aldo Arenas; and The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, which he has just
completed in France. The photographer Cindy Sherman is planning another
film, after Office Killer, in 1997; Shirin Neshat has been making films too.
Hirst will know that his fellow Brit Artists Jake and Dinos Chapman are
moving into film-making. They have two projects on the drawing board: a
horror movie, which has been in the works for a while, and a documentary
about the reconstruction of Hell, their most famous piece, which was
destroyed, along with a lot of other important work by the YBAs, when a fire
burnt down the Momart warehouse in London in May 2004.
Indicative of how important his attack on Hollywood is for him, Hirst is
flying more than 100 members of his staff into LA for the event and the
Oscar parties. His first Hollywood show is not just about those tired old
warhorses, money and celebrity. It’s also about credibility. Hirst’s
previous big US exhibition, The Elusive Truth, at Gagosian’s Manhattan
outpost in 2005, was roundly trashed by the New York critics. Michael
Kimmelman, the influential art critic for The New York Times, wrote of it
that “The obvious criticism is that his latest pictures are terrible. Warhol
got there first and did it all better, years ago ... Absent invention, they
hang there like corpses ... His act has jumped the shark”. Bye-bye, New
York. Hirst and Gagosian know that the Hollywood collecting and critical
communities can be far more easily wowed by the practised effusions of an
art superstar such as Hirst than their East Coast counterparts. Banksy had
his first big US exhibition here in September, and left people drooling over
his cheeky British antics. His Barely Legal show, ostensibly about world
poverty, was held in a downtown industrial warehouse and featured a
38-year-old painted female elephant. Jude Law, Meg White of the White
Stripes and Keanu Reeves were among the stars who came. Banksy, who may or
may not have been at the three-day event, sauntered away with more than $1m
in sales to the likes of Angelina Jolie, who attended with Brad Pitt and
spent nearly $400,000 on three pieces. Which made Chris-tina Aguilera’s
earlier acquisition of three Banksy pieces, including a pornographic picture
of Queen Victoria in a lesbian pose with a prostitute, look like a great
deal.
It is also important for Hirst to make a bigger splash in Hollywood because
many of the most significant American collectors of contemporary art are
based here, including the property magnate Eli Broad, the music and movie
mogul David Geffen and the former superagent Mike Ovitz. Hollywood loves its
art, and has had the money to indulge it. The actors Edward G Robinson,
Charles Laughton, Robert Montgomery and Vincent Price, studio heads such as
Jack Warner and Harry Cohn, and the directors Billy Wilder and George Cukor
built world-renowned collections in their day. Today’s serious Hollywood
collectors include Jack Nicholson, whose holdings are worth more than $150m;
Madonna, who has two of Frida Kahlo’s most important paintings; the actor
Steve Martin; the former Disney chief Michael Eisner and the DreamWorks
boss, Jeffrey Katzen-berg; Bob Shaye and Michael Lynne of New Line Cinema,
who made their fortune with the Lord of the Rings trilogy; the television
executive Dean Valentine; David Bowie; Dennis Hopper;and a number of younger
Hollywood stars and directors, suchas Leonardo DiCaprio, Charlize Theron and
Sofia Coppola.
When he ran the Creative Artists Agency in the late 1980s and 1990s, Ovitz
filled the atrium of his IM Pei-designed headquarters with a huge Roy
Lichtenstein and a John Baldessari; numerous works by artists such as Ed
Ruscha, Ed Kienholz and Ed Moses adorned its walls and proclaimed its high
cultural aspirations. Now Beth Swofford, a young CAA agent who represents
many leading directors and stars such as Rachel Weisz, has an impressive
collection of contemporary art in her Hollywood Hills home, including works
by Ruscha, Matthew Barney and Gerhard Richter.
Many collect Hirst. Just last week, Goldman went to the house of the
billionaire Mexican collector Eugenio Lopez, heir to the bottled-juice
company Jumex. The Jumex Collection of modern art, on the outskirts of
Mexico City, is one of the most impressive in the world, mixing
international names such as Jeff Koons with the important younger Mexicans
Gabriel Kuri and Damian Ortega. A Hirst cow’s head in formaldehyde, with its
tongue sticking out, greets visitors to Lopez’s LA home. “To see it in a
private house speaks of a level of daring I don’t usually associate with the
relaxed atmosphere of LA houses,” Goldman says. Eli Broad, who oversees the
Broad Art Foundation, also owns Hirsts, including Away from the Flock, a
pickled lamb.
Although prices for contemporary art have been boosted by new money from
American hedge-fund managers, Russian tycoons and the Chinese nouveau riche,
Hirst’s standing and valuation are by no means secure. His best-known work,
The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living (aka his
famous pickled shark), was bought from Charles Saatchi two years ago for
$12m by the hedge-fund manager Steven Cohen — at the time, one of the
highest prices ever paid for a piece of contemporary art. Some collectors
complain, however, that Hirst does not make his pieces himself any more, and
that what his team of assistants produces is much less daring and original
than it used to be. They also say he produces too much and thus devalues
what’s already on the market. It will be interesting to see just who is
willing to spend as much as $2.5m on yet another Hirst butterfly painting,
even in Hollywood.
One person who doesn’t think Hirst will have a problem is Adam Lindemann, the
author of Collecting Contemporary. “Damien Hirst is one of the superstars of
the contemporary-art world of the past decade,” Lindemann points out. “He
always seems to be producing too much work, but somehow people buy it. In
the end, Damien has the last laugh. He is the great mastermind of it all;
the critics and everyone else can basically go to hell. In that sense, he
defies gravity, which is what a great artist does. It doesn’t matter what
Kimmelman or anyone else thinks about him. Damien Hirst is Damien Hirst. And
we just saw a Peter Doig painting sell for $10m in London — suddenly, his
work doesn’t look so expensive.”
