the curious economics of contemporary art

Four collectors with much greater financial means had shown moderate interest. One buyer known to be actively pursuing the shark was Sir Nicholas Serota, director of London’s Tate Modern museum, who had a very constrained budget to work with. The agent selling the shark was New York-based Larry Gagosian, the world’s most famous art dealer.

At the time that sum was considered so ridiculous that The Sun heralded the transaction with the headline “50,000 For Fish Without Chips.” Hirst intended the figure to be an “outrageous” price, set as much for the publicity it would attract as for the monetary return. The seller was Charles Saatchi, an advertising magnate and famous art collector, who fourteen years earlier had commissioned Hirst to produce the work for £50,000. Why would anyone even consider paying this much money for the shark? Part of the answer is that in the world of contemporary art, branding can substitute for critical judgment, and lots of branding was involved here. The question was important because $12 million represented more money than had ever been paid for a work by a living artist, other than Jasper Johns – more than for a Gerhard Richter, a Robert Rauschenberg, or a Lucian Freud.

The shark had been caught in 1991 in Australia, and prepared and mounted in England by technicians working under the direction of British artist Damien Hirst.Īnother concern was that while the shark was certainly a novel artistic concept, many in the art world were uncertain whether it qualified as art. It is illustrated in the center portion of the book. The taxidermy fifteen-foot tiger shark “sculpture” was mounted in a giant glass vitrine and creatively named The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living. One problem for the agent trying to sell the stuffed shark was the $12 million asking price for this work of contemporary art.* Another was that it weighed just over two tons, and was not going to be easy to carry home.

The curious economics of contemporary art