January 2009

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Could Damien Hirst have chosen a more dramatic moment to sell a batch of new works at Sotheby’s in London last month? There was a real frisson in the air as news steadily trickled in about the banking meltdown on Wall Street, but buyers were undeterred. Although the prices were not exactly crazy, £10.3m for the star of the sale, the pickled golden calf, suggests that the art market is likely to prove resilient in this period of financial turmoil – as long, however, as the art has Hirst’s blue-chip status.

The results can surely not have been received with unalloyed joy by Hirst’s dealers, Jay Jopling of White Cube in London and Larry Gagosian in New York. Yet Hirst’s decision to take his works straight to auction is not as radical as it first appears, as Ben Wright explains in his ‘Art Business’ column this month (p. 102). Hirst is not selling directly to the public. He is simply doing what many artists have done before him – trading up to a dealer who will better serve his artistic and financial ambitions. Since there are no better dealers in the world than Joplin and Gagosian, an auction house was his only option.

Hirst’s ruthlessness is reminiscent of an artist with whom he is increasingly often compared, Francis Bacon, whose retrospective at Tate Britain is currently pulling in the crowds. In 1958 Bacon dumped the dealer Erica Brausen, who had nurtured him for 12 years, in favour of Marlborough. The impact this had on his art is something that scholars still have to investigate properly. No doubt one day it will come into focus, as historians are now very interested in the relation-ship between art and the market. For an absorbing demonstration of how significant that can be, visit an exhibition opening at the Royal Academy in London this month that examines the story of the Galerie Maeght, founded by Aimé and Marguerite Maeght in Paris in 1948 and deeply involved in the promotion of Miró, Calder, Giacometti and Braque, to name only the most celebrated of the artists they represented.

Such dealers, like Brausen, take a commercial risk, and in addition devote enormous time not only to promoting artists but also to nurturing them: the young Bacon is unlikely to have survived as an artist in the early 1950s without Brausen’s regular financial subventions. Dealers also act like a publisher’s editor, offering behind-the-scenes artistic advice. The over-stuffed vitrines that Hirst exhibited in ‘In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida’ at Tate Britain in 2004 suggest that he is the sort of artist who will suffer from a lack of that sort of attention, just as, for example, Iris Murdoch’s novels became baggy and over-long once she decided that she was too grand to accept editorial input.

The relationship of an artist and a dealer can be as emotionally intimate as that of a married couple. That of a dealer and collector is often equally complex. This is a relationship that is not often talked about, which makes Anita Zabludowicz’s frankness in the interview on pages 68-71 so fascinating: for her, finding a dealer that she could get on with sounds a little like a story from a lonely-hearts column.

Perhaps because this is Frieze month in London, I have concentrated on contemporary art, but everything about the importance of dealers to collectors of new art needs to be emphasised 10 times over when it comes to the art of the past. It is impossible to form a truly worthwhile collection – whether of porcelain, bronzes, furniture or Old Master drawings – without a great deal of advice from expert dealers. Of course the same material is available in the salerooms, but there the letters in gold on the wall, visible only to the wise, are ‘Caveat Emptor’ – something the proud purchasers of Hirst at auction should not forget.

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