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Worshipping a golden calf

Martin Gayford

Wednesday, 22nd October 2008

Martin Gayford considers whether we are in the final, pre-popping stages of an art bubble

Journalists arriving for the press view of Renaissance Faces at the National Gallery last week were greeted by placards. Why, the slogans asked — you might think reasonably enough — could that institution not pay its staff a little more, given that it was contemplating paying £50 million each for a couple of Titians?

They raised a point that troubles many people, including quite a few in the art world. In the early 21st century, the sums paid for works of art have climbed from the amazing, to the preposterous and finally reached the surreal. $104 million for a medium-quality Picasso was exceeded by a reported $140 million for a reasonably good-quality Jackson Pollock drip painting.

Last year I asked Jeff Koons what he thought of the stratospheric levels of the art market. ‘You have to pinch yourself,’ he replied. Shortly afterwards, he himself briefly became holder of the title ‘world’s most expensive living artist’ when his ‘Hanging Heart’ went for $23.6 million — a paltry amount since exceeded by works by Lucian Freud and Koons himself.

If Jeff Koons is obliged to check he’s not dreaming, many of the rest of us are reeling with astonishment. The dizzy heights of something — frenzy, art-market triumph, folly, it isn’t yet clear which — were reached on Monday 15 September 2008, a day likely to go down in two sorts of history, the ordinary variety and the art- historical kind.

In the morning, Lehman Brothers collapsed, precipitating a worldwide crisis, the aftershocks of which are shaking us still. In the evening the Damien Hirst auction took place at Sotheby’s London, and bidders duly shelled out £70.5 million for the first tranche of brand-new work, all signed and dated 2008. The most expensive piece was ‘The Golden Calf’ (knocked down for £10.3 million). The irony of this object was not lost on anybody, indeed doubtless intended by the artist. The worship of the calf in Exodus has often been taken as a metaphor for the adoration of that false idol: money. The sale, suitably entitled ‘Beautiful Inside My Head Forever’, might have been the last fling of an era intoxicated by vast, but illusory wealth.

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