Selling art or selling out?

Nights out with Damien Hirst used to be thrilling. ‘He was so provocative, so alpha male,’ says curator Karen Ashton, recalling the night in a South London pub when Hirst ordered her friend, the novelist Danny Moynihan, to climb a lamppost.

At one point, Hirst turned to Ashton and informed her that his concept for the ultimate piece of art was to get his hand amputated and then, because he had so much money, to find the best surgeon in the world to sew it back on again. ‘He made you nervous, to be honest,’ says Ashton, who runs the annual Art Car Boot Fair in Brick Lane where the newly sober YBA turned national treasure turned up last year, donated some art to charity and wasn’t provocative at all.

The night of Hirst’s amputation dream was part of a more edgy period for the now 46-year-old father of three. It was in the 1990s, the height of ‘Cool Britannia’, before he was lumbered with the epithet of being the richest contemporary artist in the world, valued at £235 million in 2011. Hirst’s ambition was still burning bright and he saw himself as the de facto leader of an outrageous group known as the Young British Artists or YBAs whose philosophy was ‘Conquer by shock’. How times have changed.

In their ranks were Sarah Lucas, known for her punky visions of Kiss Me Quick British culture with works involving melons and cucumber, and Jake and Dinos Chapman, whose plastic children sprouting penises caused controversy at Charles Saatchi’s seminal 1997 Sensation exhibition which sent the YBAs stratospheric. There was glamorous Sam Taylor-Wood, whose photographic self-portrait posing with her trousers down and the words ‘Suck, Fuck, Spank, Wank’, came to sum up the boisterous hedonism of the YBAs. Mat Collishaw was a gruff Lawrentian figure who dated Tracey Emin and whose drunken rantings on a Channel 4 show debating the Turner Prize in 1997 made the tabloid press rub their hands with glee.

But Damien Hirst was the most gleeful of all. A working-class boy from Leeds turned YBA puppetmaster, he originally made an impression on Charles Saatchi by curating a show in 1988 called Freeze, which showcased his friends’ outrageous art. By the mid-1990s, he was leading a charmed life of cocaine nights at the Groucho or the Colony Room in the rowdy company of Keith Allen and Blur’s Alex James. He’d be swigging Beaujolais and Krug and playing with his genitals (‘He always had his hand in his pocket, pulling out his cock,’ recalls Ashton). If he wanted to go a little more upscale, he would go West to his restaurant Pharmacy, in Notting Hill, which was soon hosting riotous nights with the likes of John Malkovich, David Bowie, Alexander McQueen and Björk. His main pleasure was hatching plans to make money and art, although he was never quite sure what order that should come in. ‘Money is massive,’ was one of his catchphrases.

Party photographer Dafydd Jones recalls seeing Hirst in 1994 at a Serpentine show where he was exhibiting a sheep in a tank of formaldehyde called Away From The Flock. ‘I always thought he was a bit of an idiot in those days,’ Jones confides. ‘He was always pulling faces and larking about.’ Yet Jones was impressed by Hirst’s ability to be ‘constantly on the make’. ‘That night he was networking Malcolm McLaren. Talking about how to make money.’ He finds it ‘a bit of a disappointment’ that the versatile artist whose 1991 shark in formaldehyde was described in the catalogue as ‘one of the most iconic images of late-20th-century art’, whose severed cow’s head being eaten by flies, and sinister pill cabinets all helped bring conceptual art into the mainstream, is now flogging T-shirts and cufflinks on the internet.

Go to any of Hirst’s three London shops, Other Criteria, or to his fancy new website, and you can buy anything from an ‘I spot DH’ children’s T-shirt for £20.50 to a pair of pill cufflinks for £250, or a butterfly-print umbrella in Italian polyester satin for £195. And he’s not the only one who’s come over all Ikea. Tracey Emin recently opened a new shop in Spitalfields called Emin Inter-national, which sells everything from beanie hats to mugs and egg cups decorated with pictures of her cat, Docket, for little more than a tenner.

It’s all a far cry from The Shop that Emin opened on Bethnal Green Road in 1993 with fellow artist Sarah Lucas, selling objects made from beer cans and cigarette packets and T-shirts saying ‘Complete Arsehole’ on the front. These days Emin is more likely to be found voting Tory and wining and dining with billionaire businessman Richard Caring. And you’re likely to find Hirst among the orchids of sushi restaurants, promoting his wife Maia Norman’s Harrods-stocked clothing line Mother of Pearl.

For Julian Stallabrass, art historian at the Courtauld Institute, author of High Art Lite and YBA cynic, the question is not if the YBAs have sold out but how they’ve sold out. ‘Hirst always had his eye on the main chance,’ he says. ‘His genius is in marketing, not art.’ He has to admit, though, he never thought he’d see Hirst stooping to his current depths. ‘It’s frankly bizarre that there’s now this minor Hirst industry going on selling tat.’

Artists have always been obsessed with money, from Leonardo da Vinci’s patronage by the Medici, to Salvador Dali being dubbed ‘Avida Dollars’ by a bitter André Breton in 1939. Andy Warhol said that ‘Good business is the best art’; his spiritual love child is the banker turned artist Jeff Koons, famous for the curio-kitsch he peddles to the super-rich, and a big hero to both Hirst and Emin. But Stallabrass points out that Hirst differs from Warhol in one major respect: ‘Warhol never claimed his work had any deep value. He openly said all his work was about money. Hirst, on the other hand, will sign a cigarette butt and tell you it’s art.’