Quick! Get me rewrite!
That’s what someone must have bellowed in the newsroom (or at Sotheby’s) when they saw the headline on Carol Vogel‘s initial online version (on the International Herald Tribune‘s website) of her pre-Hirst auction piece, which I linked to a little after midnight today. By the time you read this, I would not be surprised if the IHT has taken down its original version—“Damien Hirst Goes for Broke at Sotheby’s.”
Now the headline is: Up for Auction: Damien Hirst’s Big New Risk in the IHT; Damien Hirst’s Next Sensation: Thinking Outside the Dealer for the same article in today’s NY Times. It should be noted that journalists generally have nothing whatsoever to do with the headlines that get affixed by editors to their oeuvre.
In this case, the scrapped headline was provocative but, I think, correct. As I said in my late-night Hirstian musings, I don’t regard the outcome of today’s precedent-breaking auction as a reliable indicator of the general state of the contemporary art market. But it sure could have a make-it-or-break-it effect on Hirst’s market. He’s been upping the stakes with his provocative, dealer-baiting comments to the press. Larry Gagosian, who had been quoted in Sotheby’s press release indicating that he would be at the sale, “paddle in hand,” subsequently let it be know that he would be in Moscow instead, for the opening of his gallery’s new exhibition there.
As for the performance of Sotheby’s stock: At this writing, it isn’t pretty. But then neither is the Dow (although it’s rebounded somewhat from its precipitous opening). If, as has been reported, Sotheby’s has not offered Hirst any guaranteed amount for this sale, it probably has little to lose financially, only reputationally. Hirst, one assumes, will never outlive his savings, no matter what may happen later today.
I, for one, get a big kick out of the artist’s audacious, outrageous gambit and his playing it to the hilt. People with big stakes in a well-behaved art market may be considerably less admiring.