The George Lindemann Journal by George Lindemann

By Farah Nayeri - Jun 19, 2012 7:00 PM ET

Damien Hirst’s $100 million skull could be yours for just $800...

Not the real diamond-studded cranium -- a high-definition rotating image of it, certified by the artist, and available in a limited edition of 2,000 from the new digital-art venture S[edition], started in November by dealer Harry Blain.

seditionart.com via Bloomberg

A still image of the Tracey Emin neon work, "I Promise to Love You." The work is available for purchase from the U.K.-based s[edition] digital art gallery.

A still image of the Tracey Emin neon work, "I Promise to Love You." The work is available for purchase from the U.K.-based s[edition] digital art gallery. Source: seditionart.com via Bloomberg

Harry Blain and Robert Norton - seditionart.com via Bloomberg

Harry Blain and Robert Norton, co-founders of s[edition], an online gallery of digital art. Founded in November 2011, the gallery offers for sale digital works by Damien Hirst and Tracey Emin, among others.

Harry Blain and Robert Norton, co-founders of s[edition], an online gallery of digital art. Founded in November 2011, the gallery offers for sale digital works by Damien Hirst and Tracey Emin, among others. 

 

 Isaac Julien - seditionart.com via Bloomberg

Isaac Julien, a nominee for the U.K.'s 2001 Turner Prize, next to an image of his digital work "The Leopard." The screen-based work is available for $12 from the online art gallery s[edition].

Isaac Julien, a nominee for the U.K.'s 2001 Turner Prize, next to an image of his digital work "The Leopard." The screen-based work is available for $12 from the online art gallery s[edition].

Mat Collishaw artwork - seditionart.com via Bloomberg

A still shot of Mat Collishaw's swaying screen-based artwork "Whispering Weeds." The online work is available for purchase from the s[edition] digital art gallery.

A still shot of Mat Collishaw's swaying screen-based artwork "Whispering Weeds." The online work is available for purchase from the s[edition] digital art gallery. Source: seditionart.com via Bloomberg

Hirst and Tracey Emin are among artists producing the inaugural batch of works: high-quality digital stills or videos priced $8 to $1,600. Emin has contributed images of neon inscriptions. The works are for iPads, smartphones, PC and TV screens, and the artists get a cut of the sales.

So far, more than 100,000 Facebook users have “liked” the S[edition] page. The online gallery doesn’t give out totals for purchases or site subscribers. The most popular buy: a $20 still image of a Hirst dot painting, “Xylosidase,” of which 577 out of an edition of 10,000 have been sold.

“It’s modern, it’s hip, it’s new,” says Charley Uzzell Edwards, a London-based street-art and graffiti-art dealer. “But it doesn’t excite me quite as much as a nice old engraving, where you see the plate marks, and the actual physical character of the piece.”

For S[edition] to have more impact, says Uzzell Edwards, it should represent artists whose original medium is the digital screen. Stills of pre-existing artworks -- albeit low-resolution ones -- can be downloaded for free from the Web. Also, he says, edition sizes should be smaller to boost scarcity value.

Emerging Artists

S[edition] co-founder Robert Norton, former chief executive of Saatchi Online, says both issues are being addressed.

“Short-term, we want to increase our stable of well-known artists,” says Norton. “Longer-term, we want to make this a platform for more emerging artists to offer more work directly.”

The gallery also aims to set up an online secondary market for the works to be resold. Editions will then be smaller to boost their value as an investment, he says.

“The ability to resell the work is an important part, in some collectors’ minds, in the decision to buy,” he says.

Blain -- who co-founded the Haunch of Venison gallery in 2002, sold it to Christie’s International in 2007 and now co- runs BlainSouthern in London and Berlin and BlainDiDonna in New York -- says digital is the next step for the art market.

“There was a fan base out there that weren’t being engaged,” he says. “If you’re only ever talking to an existing marketplace, then you’re talking to a shrinking market.”

Watermark Tracer

Blain dismisses the threat of bootlegging, saying the product is “tracked and traced and watermarked.”

“If you have a first-edition book, it has a value, recognition of it being the original, the authentic, the first published volume,” he says. “There could be 10 billion editions of that book, but it doesn’t erode the value of the first edition.”

Among the moving-image works available on the site, Bill Viola has sequences from two of his videos, priced $200 each. Mat Collishaw’s $48 “Whispering Weeds” shows tall weeds swaying against a gray sky. Michael Craig-Martin’s $80 “Surfacing” has a square frame that moves over the line drawing underneath and colors it.

S[edition] artist Isaac Julien -- a Turner Prize nominee represented in the collections of Tate and The Museum of Modern Art -- sees the gallery as a vehicle for “democratization” of contemporary art. He’d like to see it market art originally made for the screen (as opposed to an image of a pre-existing work).

Julien, who teaches media art at the ZKM Center for Arts and Media in Karlsruhe, Germany, also hopes prices will become “a bit more expensive, to give value to that field, which is at the moment locked out of the commercial art world.”

Muse highlights include Richard Vines on London restaurants, Scott Reyburn on the art market, James Pressley on business books and Ryan Sutton on New York restaurants.

To contact the writer on the story: Farah Nayeri in London at Farahn@bloomberg.net.

To contact the editor responsible for this story: Manuela Hoelterhoff at mhoelterhoff@bloomberg.net.

via bloomberg.com

Peter Macdiarmid/Getty ImagesDamien Hirst’s ‘The Kingdom’, featuring a tiger shark in formaldehyde, on display at Sotheby’s in London in 2008.

LONDON — Don’t know much about art, but you know what you like? Well, what do you think of Damien Hirst, he of the pickled shark and diamond-encrusted skull?

The 46-year-old Briton is reputedly the country’s richest artist after making a fortune of around $300 million since breaking into the international art scene in the early 1990s as the most prominent of the Young British Artists movement.

His erstwhile patron, Charles Saatchi, has called him a genius and placed him up there with the Americans Jackson Pollock, Andy Warhol and Donald Judd as one of a handful of contemporary artists whose reputations will endure.

But as London’s Tate Modern gallery prepares to launch the artist’s first British retrospective next week to coincide with the city’s hosting of the Olympic Games, one critic has ruffled art world feathers by advising investors in Mr. Hirst’s work to get out while they can.

“His works may draw huge crowds when they go on show in a five-month-long blockbuster retrospective at Tate Modern next week,” Julian Spalding wrote in Britain’s The Independent. “But they have no artistic content and are worthless as works of art. They are, therefore, worthless financially.”

He said collectors such as Steve Cohen, the Wall Street hedge fund billionaire who was said to have paid $12 million for Hirst’s “The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living” in 2005, could end up with something no more valuable than a shark in a tank.

“I’ve coined the term Con Art,” said Mr. Spalding, “short for contemporary conceptual art and for art that cons people.” He is so incensed that he’s written a book on the subject — “Con Art — Why you ought to sell your Damien Hirsts while you can” — to be published this weekend.

Hirst’s fans naturally demur. “Hirst’s work asks viewers to question the main dilemmas of human existence: birth, illness, death and religion,” according to the Tate Modern’s blurb, perhaps unwittingly reinforcing the thought that art should be seen and not heard.

And no one would begrudge Mr. Hirst his wealth. In an interview to be broadcast next week by Channel 4 television, Mr. Hirst recalls growing up poor in the northern city of Leeds. “When I was a kid we had so little money I remember looking for money on the street,” he says.

Oliver Basciano, a critic writing for Channel 4 News, castigated Mr. Spalding for conflating art and money. “His first key gripe seems to be that he thinks that Hirst’s work is likely to depreciate in financial value and the Tate needs to offload it quick.

“Now I have no idea whether it will or not — I’m no market monitor — but the idea that a public gallery should be building their collection with an eye to its market worth is beyond troublesome.”

Buyers, in any case, appear undeterred. A doodle of a dead shark that Mr. Hirst rapidly sketched as a tip for a cab driver fetched the equivalent of $7,500 at auction in London this week, 13 times the pre-auction estimate.

Perhaps I should declare a personal interest. Mr. Hirst gave a similar shark doodle to my son, Joe, a struggling painter and Hirst admirer who once met the maestro at a private view. Keep it safe, Joe.

"Put Me in the Zoo is a famous children’s book by Robert Lopshire, originally released in 1960 on Dr. Seuss’s publishing imprint. It tells the story of a spotted leopard who can change his spots and their colors, and can even juggle them. He fails to convince two children that he is special enough to be in the zoo, and in the end they tell him where he belongs, and the story ends happily.

Little could Mr. Lopshire have known that his story would one day explain Damien Hirst’s spot paintings to a tee. In fact it could be surmised that Mr. Hirst, below referred to as $pot, was directly inspired by this story."

Damien Hirst with one of his spot paintings. He is reviving this earlier genre with a bang.

By CAROL VOGEL
Published: December 13, 2011

LONDON — Just as the financial markets were heading for disaster in 2008, the British artist Damien Hirst snubbed his dealers and persuaded Sotheby’s here to sell 223 primarily new artworks. There were dead animals — sharks, zebras, piglets and even a calf — floating in giant glass tanks of formaldehyde; cabinets filled with diamonds; and cigarette butts. And paintings galore: spin paintings, spot paintings, paintings with butterflies pinned under glass...