The AppraisalHirst’s auction market first began to heat up in the early 2000s, when works were selling out quickly on the primary market. Overall prices reached their zenith in 2007, when a 2002 work,a glass cabinet filled with miniature handmade pills, which responded to Hirst’s early iconic works, including his spot paintings and medicine cabinets,Hirst’s market peaked in 2008. That year, his work flooded auctions, with volume increasing 63.4 percent to rake in $268.8 million in total sales.
12,178 users have searched Artnet’s Price Database for Hirst in the past 12 months, and so far in 2022, he is the sixth-best-performing contemporary artist at auction, with works making some $28.1 million. Damien Hirst with The Currency artworks, 2021. Photographed by Prudence Cuming Associates Ltd. © Damien Hirst and Science Ltd. All rights reserved, DACS 2022.A resurgence in Hirst’s market this year could partly be attributed to the wider economic situation. People tend to flock to brand names in a recession as a surer hold of value against inflation, and Hirst’s ubiquitous brand certainly won’t hurt him in that respect.
That said, the art market tends to lag behind general world events, so it may be too early to posit that buyer psychology alone is driving the trend.Overall, however, Hirst’s decision in recent years to veer away from vitrines and spot paintings to large, abstract, colorful compositions such as the cherry blossoms has dovetailed with market tastes that have moved away from dry conceptual work towards expressionistic, painterly works on canvas.
These are being produced at volume, but are still highly sought after, and there have been strong results for those that have appeared at auction so far. It’s too early to say for sure, but if you watch this space, you just might see something bloom.
Damien Hirst will forever be described in ‘The Price of Everything’ as an artist whose ‘price has gone down’ - Stefan Edlis