The first day of Damien Hirst' auction is over: according to English press it smashed top estimates to bring in a record total of £70.5m ($125m), with still more works for sale. Never before a living artist of this magnitude abandoned the traditional method of selling through dealers and galleries, going straight to the auction house Sotheby's instead. Sotheby's say the sale - which runs over two days - has set a new record for a sale dedicated to one artist. Among the lots were The Golden Calf - a bull in a tank of formaldehyde, with its head crowned by a gold disc - which sold for £9.2m ($16.5m).
The auction, entitled Beautiful Inside My Head Forever, was the first of three that will sell a total of 223 art works by Hirst. The previous record for a sale dedicated to a single artist was set in 1993 for works by Picasso, which went for a total of $20m (£11m).
For those who are not familiair wit the work of Damien Hirst: go see 'For the Love of God' this fall at the Rijksmuseum. Commercial director Jan Willem Sieburgh pulled a real stunt getting Hirst to show it for the first time outside Britain. It's a platinum cast of a human skull encrusted with more than 8000 diamonds, including a pear-shaped pink diamond located in the forehead of the skull. The work's title was supposedly inspired by Hirst's mother, who once asked, “For the love of God, what are you going to do next?”
Hirst claims that the piece was sold on 30 August 2007, for £50 million, to an anonymous consortium. In 2007 Polish artist Peter Fuss created For the Laugh of God, a similar work made from plastic and glass (including 9870 imitation diamonds) and costing about £1000, saying "Our British friends, we are coming to rescue you!
