My art is my kids' trust fund

Hirst is selling the contents of his now defunct restaurant, Pharmacy

11 April 2012

The first thing you notice about Damien Hirst is how well he's looking. He has let his hair grow and turn a soft grey; his eyes are sparkling behind chunky spectacles and his skin has a healthy glow.

He doesn't fidget like he used to. He orders a glass of water. He's still completely at home in the Groucho Club, where he's hosting a launch for his new book of drawings, but he doesn't look like the rackety old fixture he once did. At 39, the days of week-long benders with Alex James from Blur are long gone.

"Being sober is quite weird," he declares. "I've had a few drinks here and there, but I haven't gone off the rails for a couple of years now. I mean, I still go to parties, but I always get some sleep after them, whereas before we didn't really go to sleep. That's the difference."

Hirst is moving on in other ways, too. The artist still famous for " pickling" a shark will next year mount an exhibition of old-fashioned oil paintings - yes, paintings (not spin, not dot, but figurative) - in New York. He says he is more productive than he has ever been, yet he is less than ever a part of the glamorous London art world. He couldn't tell you who's on this year's Turner Prize shortlist, for example.

"I haven't kept up with it recently," he says, shrugging. "You do lose touch. I end up getting involved with my children's school rather than the art world." Hirst lives in Devon with his partner, fashion designer Maia Norman, and their two sons, nine-year-old Connor and four-year-old Cassius (he also has a holiday home in Mexico). He went to the local school recently and made spin paintings with the kids. "They loved it."

Tonight, meanwhile, Hirst finally says goodbye to his Notting Hill restaurant, Pharmacy, where, on a busy Friday night, many a lost weekend was begun with a '"Cough Syrup" cocktail.

The restaurant was closed in 2003, a financial disaster, yet at Sotheby's this evening its contents will be sold for an estimated £3 million. All designed by Hirst, the chairs, tables, cutlery, glasses and so on are reckoned to be artworks in their own right: even the matchbooks are under the hammer (estimated price: £4,000 to £6,000 for a signed collage of 60).

The pre-sale display at Sotheby's was strongly reminiscent of a house clearance after the death of someone with very strange taste.

"It does feel like a funeral, yes," says Hirst, in a still-strongly inflected Yorkshire accent. "I'm sorry it closed down. I did stupidly think that the restaurant would live longer than I lived, maybe because all the restaurants I go to are quite traditional and have existed for ages. I think I was aiming to do that.

"It was like, I could put all this art there and it would live, it wouldn't get dusty or be behind bullet-proof glass." Hirst talks very quickly, pausing occasionally so that you think he's finished - and then starting up again with a sudden new thought. "But I've got over it now. It was tough at the end, but there'll be this cheque to come out of it. That's nice."

Hirst has always been very aware of the commercial value of his art, and very astute at raising it. From the moment he first appeared on the art scene - the inventive young Goldsmiths student who curated the nowlegendary show, Freeze, in 1988 - his entrepreneurial spirit set him apart from his peers.

Today he talks about maximising the value of his work for the sake of his children, and how he'd rather have "art in the warehouse than money in the bank" (though he surely has oodles of money, too). The fire at the Momart warehouse in east London earlier this year "totally pissed me off " not because it destroyed iconic and irreplaceable artworks, but because of the potential financial loss to his family.

Hirst lost 12 works in the fire, plus art from his own collection by his good friends Sarah Lucas and Angus Fairhurst. "You put aside some paintings because you're thinking about the future, so that when you die they're like a trust fund for the kids.

And you never know, next year they might be worth less, but they might also be worth double. [The fire] was like someone asking you to leave the casino before you're ready."

And what of last year's apparent "feud" with his old patron and promoter, Charles Saatchi? First, he refused to co-operate with the opening of the new Saatchi Gallery at County Hall, which featured a Damien Hirst exhibition; then he bought back almost all his pieces from the Saatchi collection. What was all that about?

"I didn't want a London show at the time of the Saatchi opening," he says of his failure to back the new venture. "I'd arranged to do a show at the Tate of spot paintings and that was cancelled because Charles did the show at County Hall. It was unfortunate - annoying - but when you sell things to somebody, they can do what they want."

So you bought them back in a fit of pique? "A good answer to that would be to say I bought them back because I could afford to. I'd just had a show at White Cube and made a load of money.

"I've started collecting my own stuff. I realised there was a big hole at the beginning of my career where I didn't keep anything, which was stupid. I didn't have a formaldehyde piece and Charles had two, and I didn't have an early medicine cabinet.

"So I suddenly thought I'd do it all in one big swoop and buy those works back. It's like, if you were going to set up a museum in the future, you might need them".

Does he mean to set up a Damien Hirst museum, then? "I dunno if it would have my name on it," he muses. "I think it's nice to give a bit back, if you're in the position to afford it.

When you stop drinking and taking drugs, you think, well, it's not going up my nose any more so I can do something philanthropic."

Of course, Hirst and his peers have become the art establishment, and it's no surprise that he values the attention of bigwigs at the Tate rather more than he does that of Charles Saatchi. I ask him about his new paintings, but he won't say much, other than that the subjects are sometimes taken from newspaper photographs and that the show will be called The Elusive Truth.

"A lot of them are medical - there's one of a doctor's surgery, one of a mortuary." So, a radical departure of medium rather than subject. All the same, people will be surprised by the move.

"I like doing the unexpected. I'm an egomaniac, a power-maniac - I've always loved that thing where people get blown away by what you do, by new work. That's a kind of power - I'll be doing macrame vases next."

Hirst has always been regarded as the founder of the Britart pack, yet he's unsure that the movement ever existed beyond the arts pages. Whatever its origins, we agree that Britart is now dead.

The protagonists certainly can't be described as young anymore. The way he describes the aims of some of that art is quite brilliant, however: "It was about making people see the horror of the world in a cup of tea."

He adds that he was hurt by the harsh verdict on Britart recently delivered by the eminent Australian critic Robert Hughes, who wrote of an art world "swollen with currency' and of the 'vanity of inflated reputation".

"You know, people get old, your ball goes in their garden and they won't give it back," Hirst says. "They get ratty - people get bitter and twisted."

His book of drawings, meanwhile, is perhaps yet another sign of incipient middle age. A compilation of sketches for work created over the past 15 years, it is a tour through Damien's weirdo mind.

"People don't think contemporary artists can draw, do they?" he asks rhetorically. "But how else was I supposed to work out that an elephant in formaldehyde wouldn't have worked? They don't realise you start with monkeys, and go to gerbils before you get to sheep."

Serious - but still not that serious perhaps. Unless you're talking dollars.

The Pharmacy auction starts at 6pm tonight at Sotheby's, 34-35 New Bond Street, and is open to the public. Estimates start at £50.

MORE ABOUT

Drawing

My art is my kids' trust fund

Read More