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James Bradburne
Franziska Nori
Piroschka Dossi
Pier Luigi Sacco
Wolfgang Ullrich
Julian Stallabrass
Boris Groys


Icons of Capitalism: How Prices Make Art

It is above all through high prices that art seeks to assert itself today, if indeed it is not wholly defined in these terms. It has been transformed into a form of financial sublimity. The news that has been pouring in from the art market for some years bears out this view of the situation. Prices have risen to such a degree that records are always being broken: the highest figures paid for a painting, a work by a living artist, a photograph. The records are mostly set at auctions and the works fetching the most spectacular sums are featured on the television news and the front pages of the major newspapers. The interested public has come to associate names like Pablo Picasso, Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko with eight or even nine-figure sums, and some are already beginning to speculate on when the milestone of a billion will be reached for a work of art. It is therefore obvious in this context to talk about the sublime and certainly well worth taking a closer look than normal at the influence all this money has on art.
While the awareness of large sums unquestionably alters the perception of art, in the middle of all this is the object for which the money has been paid, namely the work itself, and what observers want is to pinpoint its particular value: to find all that money once again in the artwork, to see what distinguishes such an expensive object from any another. And so they look with more attention, practically through the detective’s magnifying glass. Where is the particularly fine workmanship or extraordinary material? Should we not see a far greater profusion of resources, greater intensity, brilliance and presence than in the case of less costly objects? These investigations generally lead nowhere. No sensational technical quality is found, especially in modern art. But poor visibility fosters heightened sensibility. Astronomical sums seem all the greater the less we can actually see.

Money remains present in any case, in that price functions as an assertion of value, suggesting that the work of art in question must be great. Instead of being solely an indicator of a value, price also enhances consideration and thus comes paradoxically to pave the way for further increases as though it were a constituent element of the artwork as such. Otherwise, it is the oracles of the art world, above all institutions like museums and the antiseptic “white cubes” of modern galleries, which pass judgement and thus “make” what is generally regarded as art. Whatever is presented in a “white cube” is looked at with greater attention and respect for the sole fact of being exhibited in that place. A great deal of modern and contemporary artistic production would be quite unthinkable without this institution. Ready-mades, for example, would be wholly undistinguishable from the everyday objects that they actually are. The general public is intimidated in these cases just as it is by exorbitant market prices. They understand that what is presented is art but cannot recognize it as such.

Despite the analogies between the white cube and market prices, however, the particular value set for a work presents itself in different ways in the two cases. (1) In the museum, the work becomes an item for exhibition. It is free, stripped of all reference to everyday life, and thus “estranged”. Instead of being perceived with all its normal connections like other things, it is isolated and for this reason the focus of particular attention. As few other points of reference are provided for the understanding, however, the work remains extraneous and incomprehensible. And it is precisely this aura of mystery that enhances its meaningfulness. Price instead creates references. Something with a price tag attached is evaluated in the universal language of money. It enters into relations with all the other things that have prices. The more something costs, the greater its distance from everyday goods and its proximity to others, to those with very high prices. If a museum reconsiders the significance of a work by exhibiting it in absolute terms, it is also reassessed on the market, as always happens when something is offered at a higher price and thus incorporated into a real world where everything is more expensive and presumably better. It is just the few record-breaking works that constitute a class apart. By comparison with these, even what forms part of the most lavish lifestyle appear comparatively economical and middle-class.

Ever since hype made its appearance on the art market, critics have also realized that talking about high prices generates meaning. As a result, art has come to be discussed almost exclusively in terms of money over the last few years, even in newspaper supplements. Reviewers make a point of recalling how much an artist’s works cost and the prices they have fetched at auctions. This also happens when there is no new record to make public. It is always and in any case a way of expressing appreciation for an artist. Works for which no bids have been made in an auction are not even mentioned. Critics also delight, however, in associating the significance of dead artists that have now attained classic status with the vast sums that have been paid for their works, as though figures were capable of expressing their value with greater clarity and solemnity than words. A price list thus dispenses with the need for complicated and often garbled verbal promotion and description of the specific qualities of a work. The emotionalism often characterizing artistic commentaries gives way to the sublimity of figures with a great many zeroes.
Still more explicit in linking art and money, magazines like ArtInvestor, founded in 2001, print details of market trends and prices for artists alongside reproductions of their works. Professionals operating in the sector can find other databases on the Internet. The market leader is artprice.com, which offers approximately 25 million auction prices and additional services defining an artist’s quality exclusively on the basis of market performance.

Prices are so omnipresent that knowing how much a Jeff Koons, Gerhard Richter or Damien Hirst costs is part of the public’s general culture. Their prices are known in the same way as their names or the titles of the works. Many remember that the skull encrusted with about 8,600 diamonds produced by Damien Hirst in 2007 fetched £50 million, more or less €75 million. It has been featured repeatedly in popular magazines, which never fail to mention the price. But how many know that its title is For the Love of God? This detail is not remembered anything like so often. Would it be an exaggeration to say that the price now forms part of a work just as much as the name of the artist or its title, that it has even become one of its constituent elements, that it confers the same value and offers the same guarantees as the white cube?
The value of the information that accompanies a work and defines it more precisely in physical terms must be seen within a broader historical context. This information had no importance in medieval times because most works of art were closely connected with ritual in spheres that defined their significance and type of perception. The artists were often anonymous, the works had no titles and market prices simply did not exist. It was only with the growing autonomy of art that data such as name of artist, title and price also grew in importance to make up for the loss involved in the fact that the work no longer had a clear context as part of a religion or the power structure of a court.

When art made its entrance into private homes with the Renaissance, the identity of the author of a painting or sculpture was already no longer a matter of indifference. Like a trademark, the name of the most famous artist possible served to ensure that the work in question would receive all due consideration and be in no way diminished by the mundane nature of everyday life. Much later, at the end of the 19th century, artists such as James Whistler and Odilon Redon discovered that they could influence the perception of their works also with a well-chosen title, thus obtaining additional importance as well as greater artistic value in a comparatively simple way. A view of a river by night acquired an aura of mystery when endowed with the title Nocturne in Blue and Gold by Whistler.
In an age which art was created more and more often for the museum and the white cube, titles also offered a way of attenuating the isolation of the work. The preference was for titles that did not confine themselves to simply stating what could in any case be seen in the painting but instead mentioned a feeling, a metaphysical conviction or a phenomenon belonging to a different sphere, thus creating associations and connections between the work and the world of the observer.

The indication of price introduces a further connection and constitutes the most recent way to prevent art from being too detached from reality. It does not serve solely to counteract the isolation and severing of connections to which the work is subject in the white cube. Like the latter, it also constitutes a protected space. The higher the price, the greater its power to replace even the white cube. Prices enjoy great authority in a society steeped in capitalism. While a title can be dismissed as a rhetorical device used by the artist to transform the work as though by magic and give it the appearance of art, while a white cube owes its charisma exclusively to architectural stimuli, the payment of huge sums serves as direct proof that we are really dealing with something special, with great art. At the very least, someone has been willing to spend lots and lots of money in order to have it.
Would it not therefore make sense for museums also to include details of the purchasing or current market prices of the works on display? The visitor would be even more impressed. For every item exhibited, its equivalent could be calculated in terms of detached houses, sports cars or laptops. Many would look at the work with new – and greater – attention. And if every object on display in a museum had its price tag as in a supermarket (but without being for sale), visitors could think about which they would buy if it were possible. Prices would provide a yardstick of judgment helping visitors to connect what they see with their everyday life.
But this is not all. In the case of a truly astronomical price, its indication would perform the further function of certifying the extraordinary nature of the work, which could be presented as an exceptional case. This would give us the quality so often demanded of modern art. Ever since Romanticism at the latest, art has been regarded as “other”, a dimension of surprise and exceptionality. Instead of adapting to the everyday order, it has to break away from it. It is precisely sublimity that is expected of art. Obscurity and incomprehensibility become signs of its uniqueness. Any link between art and money was denied for a long time precisely in order to preserve this characteristic, because art would thus enter into relations with everything and might be debased. The alienation of the white cube was therefore more in line with what was expected of art.

Whoever recognizes the yearning for the sublime as the hallmark of modern art will also see that with the boom of the market over the last few years, high and especially record prices have suddenly come to promise exceptionality and lofty feelings more than anything else. (2) What was done in the era of the avant-garde movements with radical abstractions, daring ready-mades and performances breaking all taboos is obtained today through art fairs and auctions. The sublimity and “otherness” of art is made manifest. It astonishes because there is often nothing comparable in terms of price. It becomes all the more incomprehensible the harder it is to see why anyone should pay so much for a work, just what makes it so special, and what you get in return for the money.
The fact that Jackson Pollock’s painting Number 5 (1948) fetched €140 million at an auction in 2006 is incomprehensible to most people, who shake their heads and consider it an affront. The same price for a painting by Albrecht Dürer or Michelangelo would be equally exorbitant but easier to justify. It could in fact be explained in terms of the antiquity of the work, its rarity, and above all its capacity to arouse attention and prompt a constant stream of new theories, reflections and comments over the centuries.
The more shocking it is, the more the exorbitant price of the Pollock has the effect of “rejuvenating” the work and giving it a second springtime. While the artist’s action painting still had the character of a protest against the tradition of art and an American challenge to the Old World back in the 1940s and 1950s, his works have acquired such canonical status in the last few decades that they no longer irritate anybody. Featured in schoolbooks and on posters, Pollock had lost his aura of a rebel and outsider to become a classic. It is only the rise in market prices that causes any fuss. The irritation caused directly by the paintings two generations ago is now felt on seeing them with their price tag. The shocks of the avant-garde are now repeated in auction rooms.

These prices are, however, due not so much to the artists as to those prepared to pay them. They appear to be fully aware of their power and determined to pay the most astronomical prices precisely for works that are particularly poor, amateurish, tawdry and tasteless. They also know that this is the easiest way to make the front pages and to distinguish themselves from the tastes of the general public, and hence that these choices will enhance their prestige. This is why it is above all the most fashionable artists, like Jeff Koons, Richard Prince and Takashi Murakami, that they regale with record prices. While the price is often only noteworthy thing about the works of these artists, they are considered the best because they deliver the promised “otherness” through provocation and incomprehensibility. The hype on the art market has therefore created new ways of meeting the demand for the sublime.
It is scarcely open to question that price can be a constituent element of the artwork, as is recognized not only by dealers and collectors but also by many artists. The British conceptual artist and creator of installations Jeremy Deller has thus made it known that he decides whether something is art on the basis of price. (3) Damien Hirst and Jeff Koons go still further and regard it as part of their work as artists to have their say about prices, with the aim at best of setting a new record and thereby generating a moment of sublimity. It is precisely because the price is so crucial to the perception and value of a work that they do not want to leave it in the hands of other actors on the market. While Koons already stated back in the 1980s that he had worked as a stock broker and thus had a professional’s understanding of the laws of the market (especially as regards selling), Damien Hirst is the one most determined today to rank his works according to the prices they fetch.
It was the artist himself – not a gallery owner or art dealer – who arranged with Sotheby’s in 2004 to auction the contents of the London restaurant Pharmacy, which had slumped after being all the rage for a few years. Hirst had had it fitted out like a chemist’s shop and now wanted to get rid of all the furnishings right down to the ashtrays. In order to improve the chances of the sale, which those in the know had viewed with some scepticism, he persuaded the auction house not only to feature details of Pharmacy on the cover of the catalogue but also to let him design it in person and include sheets of stickers for people to customize their copies. Moreover, the rooms in which the auction was held were hung for a week with the wallpaper designed by Hirst for the restaurant. Sotheby’s thus found itself in the middle of a revival of Pharmacy, especially as a huge party was organized before the auction. (4) The fact that the 168 lots of restaurant furnishings fetched a total of over £11 million after being valued at less than a quarter of that sum was no longer a surprise but rather the obvious result of a professionally organized auction.
The benefits Hirst obtained from this coup are not only material. The huge profits made him and his works a focus of attention for all the newspapers, with an enormous gain in terms of publicity. And in addition to buying mementos of a cool lifestyle, the purchasers of items from Pharmacy were also able to enjoy the feeling of having been part of a legendary auction. By paying those mind-boggling prices, they turned the artist and his work into stars while laying the foundations for subsequent resale of the same objects at perhaps even higher prices. The spectacular sums fetched thus endowed the artworks with particular significance and brought a new increase in value. In this case, however, the credit for the success of the auction must go first and foremost to Damien Hirst and his precise choreography. The buyers simply carried out what he had planned with such boldness and originality.

Hirst’s ambition as artist to set the price himself as an essential part of the work manifested itself still more clearly in 2007, when he placed For the Love of God, the diamond-encrusted skull mentioned above, on the market. He had already made it known that the diamonds used were themselves worth £12 million, a wholly unprecedented figure for the value of an artwork in terms of material alone. The set price of £50 million was no less staggering. No work by a living artist had ever cost so much. This price was, however, not paid at an auction, and hence verifiable, but supposedly by a consortium of anonymous purchasers, and doubts were soon raised. Was that the figure really paid? Was the skull really sold? When it later emerged that Hirst was himself a member of the consortium, people were quick to say that he had been forced to step in so as to avert disaster. But what is a record price actually worth if the artist can only obtain it through personal involvement as purchaser?
Hirst must of course have already planned to take part in the purchase in order to send a message and present himself as in control of the price, which is such an integral part of his work that he had no intention of leaving its determination to the free market. If he had “bought” the skull on his own, however, the price would no longer have been something to be taken seriously. Hence the idea of the consortium to kill two birds with one stone, enabling him to set the price and establish its validity.
The critic Tom Morton wrote with a certain disdain in the art magazine Frieze that while the work was “about nothing if not numbers”, the exorbitant price would not make it any better. (5) According to Richard Dorment in the Daily Telegraph, the record price would focus the maximum attention on the diamond-encrusted skull but at the same time prevent its owner of being happy and prove a curse. Being attached to what was actually a vulgar object, it should in fact give rise to constant misgivings and pangs of conscience. How could you go to sleep at night knowing that the money spent on the skull could have been used to build schools and hospitals or combat disease and hunger? “For the Love of God is a hand grenade thrown into a decadent, greedy, and profoundly amoral world where art meets money.” (6)
It is thus recognized here too that the Hirst’s real work is the price. It is this that makes the work unique. On the one hand, the work without its price would be no more than a frivolous knickknack and certainly lack the explosive impact of a hand grenade. On the other, the price also needs its object. The sublimity that constitutes such a highly prized commodity in art is generated only when the price cannot be justified and the money therefore remains invisible. And then there is another and more important side to the operation Hirst carries out. Instead of putting just any work of art – like a landscape, a video or a cumbersome installation – up for sale at an incomprehensibly inordinate price, he has invented something endowed with such existential pathos as to express that exorbitant price in wholly symbolic terms.
In this way, however, price is not just part of the work but its subject. Represented in the form of a glistening death’s head, the astronomical figure becomes an object of contemplation and the lofty sentiments it arouses can take concrete shape. The inconceivability of £50 million is echoed in the inconceivability of death a counterpart and the skull’s message as a memento mori also prompts a way of thinking about money. The fact that it cannot be grasped in that order of magnitude suddenly appears mysterious, disquieting and even horrifying.

If the power of money is thus formulated as a matter of life and death, its immense value in a capitalist society finds a wholly appropriate form of expression. The power of money thus finds symbolic representation in art. This is the breakthrough of works like Damien Hirst’s For the Love of God. No one before had ever succeeded in representing money by artistic means. There may have been artists who painted banknotes, were concerned the world of luxury and created deluxe settings, but none of this offered the perception of what huge sums actually meant. If the high price is instead reflected in the subject, the artwork becomes an icon of capitalism, one that celebrates in its sublimity the money that the work costs. Art offers the opportunity to reflect in a concentrated form on money, to experience it in its very essence. Capitalism is thus spotlighted in the hype of the art market more effectively and on a larger scale than anywhere else. Just as artists in the past celebrated religion or royalty, they now serve capitalism, the dominant power of the present, bowing to its sublimity and asserting themselves within it at the same time.

Nearly all the works that have fetched the highest prices in recent years take money as their subject matter and are again produced so as to represent it symbolically. Consider the multiple by Jeff Koons entitled Hanging Heart, a copy of which (there are five in all) was auctioned in November 2007 for $23 million. Once again, it is not clear who exactly paid the price. Larry Gagosian, who bought the work from one collector apparently on behalf of another, is also Koons’s agent.
The magenta-coloured steel heart weighing over 1,500 kilos and covered in various layers of lacquer can be regarded to a pendant to Hirst’s diamond skull. The very fact that the two works are rigidly symmetrical – and as schematic as pictograms – makes them symbols of something universal. It is natural to immerse oneself in them and regard them as icons. As polished and sparkling as the skull and equally perfect in its workmanship, the heart speaks to another existential dimension of mankind. Radiating energy and optimism with its size and its glowing colour, it symbolizes the experience of boundless love that can also be seen as ingenuous and childish because of its unquestioning nature but is capable of setting enormous forces in motion due to its confidence that everything will be all right in the end. The heart thus embodies the very fantasies of power that are otherwise connected with money. Through the astronomical price that was paid for it and remains attached to it, it has become a friendly symbol of the power of money. It is indeed difficult to imagine a more positive icon of capitalism. When you see the heart hanging with all the millions it weighs, it is possible to believe that there is nothing money cannot do.

The indeterminacy of money manifests itself in other works sold for astronomical amounts that can be taken as symbols of the sublime and the unrepresentable. In formal terms, they recall the characteristic property of money as something capable of being used in the most disparate forms for the most disparate purposes. The painting False Start (1959) by Jasper Johns, auctioned for $17 million in 1988 and resold in 2006, apparently for $80 million, is thus made up of irregular planes of violent, gestural colour that intersect and overlap. Scattered here and there on the surface of the painting are the names of the colours, which do not, however, correspond to the colours of the areas in which they are situated. The presence of the names clarifies that the work is concerned precisely with the colours as such, not with expressing a state of mind or an abstract motif. Here the colours are nothing but paint and you can make of them what you will. The painting thus presents a range of possibilities in form and development paralleled only by money.

An analogous process can be seen in Willem de Kooning’s painting Interchange (1955), auctioned in 1989 for more than $20 million, and Mark Rothko’s White Center (Yellow, Pink, and Lavender on Rose) (1950), which fetched $72.8 million dollars at Sotheby’s in 2007. These are again abstract paintings but creating a dynamic and intense effect and thus capable of symbolizing the power of money. Unlike Hirst and Koons, Rothko and De Kooning did not calculate these astronomical prices in advance or indeed make them a part of the creative process. It was instead the money of collectors that went independently in search of objects capable of representing it in particularly expressive terms – as primal matter, so to speak – and ensuring at the same time that the exorbitant price also generates the requisite degree of disquietude.

Artists were already thinking about the way price influences the perception and value of the work and wondering about the possibility of making this a subject of artistic activity back in the 1950s. Yves Klein thus held a show at a Milanese gallery in 1957 with eleven monochromatic blue works, all identical in terms of size and facture. As he explained, however, the prices were “of course” all different (“les prix étaient tous différents bien sûr”), his point being to show that the quality of a work did not rest exclusively on its physical appearance (“la qualité picturale de chaque tableau était perceptible par autre chose que l’apparence matérielle”). (7) While it is true that the claim that the paintings all had different prices is probably just a myth put about by Klein, (8) it does bear witness to an early interest in awareness of the power of money through the setting of prices. Klein’s assertion is reflected in the intense and glowing blue, stimulating representations of boundless freedom and weightless flow in which anything is possible. Whoever spends his or her money on such a painting can experience this in real terms and be constantly reminded afresh of the range of possibilities opened up by capital. And the more the painting costs, the better it is. As more money is concentrated in it, it becomes charged with its power, its effect is intensified, and so it is also worth more.

Of all the works that have hit the headlines in recent years due to their exorbitant prices, there is only one that it proves hard to regard also as an icon of capitalism. This is Lucian Freud’s painting Benefits Supervisor Sleeping (1995), which became the most expensive work by a living artist on being auctioned by Christie’s for $33.64 million in May 2008. It shows an obese woman stretched out and apparently dozing on a flower-patterned sofa, somewhat awkwardly given her size. The artist makes no effort to hide the fact that she is a posed model by placing her in a more natural everyday environment but rather displays her in all her misshapenness, the exact opposite of the well-exercised healthy and beautiful bodies demanded by a society obsessed with physical appearance.
The sheer skill of the depiction is of course not enough to explain the price, which is not even represented symbolically in the subject. The work is in fact concerned neither with interpreting the power of money nor addressing the subject of the sublime. For this reason, however, its price seems to be purely fortuitous and extrinsic: a mere figure, evidence of hype, a curiosity. It forms no part of the work and any attempt to bring them together and arouse lofty feelings ends in failure.

If the price is an integral part of the work in the other examples given here, this raises the question of what will happen when the boom comes to an end, the economy collapses, and there are no more millions to spend on a painting, sculpture or multiple. Will all these works by Hirst, Koons and Rothko not lose their meaning too? Artists will certainly be no longer in a position to set prices in accordance with a logic of exaggeration. And the works that have broken records over the last few years will seem all the disquieting. The fact that millions were paid for an outsize heart, the furnishings of a restaurant and an abstract painting will be considered totally incomprehensible and what was basically an exaggeration will go down in history as a record for all time. Number 5, Hanging Heart and For the Love of God may thus live on for centuries in the collective memory as key works of a historically unique art market constituting a chapter apart.
The works in question will then be viewed with amazement as something unreal. More than ever before, efforts will be made to understand what so much money was paid for and no answers will be found. As these astronomical prices will then be a thing of the past, they will no longer serve as assertions of value. Their authority will have vanished and they will remain an absurdity. What arouses lofty sentiments today will then be simply incomprehensible. And all that money will not just become invisible but disappear completely as no longer recoverable.

Even today, however, the impossibility of relating the astronomical prices to the actual works raises doubts that the money paid may have already vanished into thin air. It is only by selling the work that its existence can be ascertained. Otherwise its condition remains uncertain, and the wonder caused by the inconceivability of an astronomical sum can turn at any moment into doubt as to whether it is still recoverable. The thought of economic collapse and loss therefore plays no minor part in every discussion about the icons of capitalism. And once again this is crystallized and encapsulated best of all in Damien Hirst’s diamond skull, which can be seen like an omen of possible collapse. It is only in this work, a variation on the classic Vanitas painting, that transience and impermanence are present as motifs. Generally unnoticed, unlike the selling price, the title itself alludes to this. “For the love of God” is the terrified exclamation of someone in peril. It also expresses, like the death’s head itself, uncertainty as to the fate of the £50 million. Is it just invisible or has at least part of it already vanished?

It may, however, not be Hirst’s skull but another work or rather action that is celebrated as best exemplifying the hype of the art market after the it has collapsed. Perhaps people’s minds will turn more often to Bill Drummond and Jimmy Cauty, who dared to destroy one million pounds earned from the sale of records in August 1994 by throwing wads of fifties into a bonfire. The declaredly artistic event took about an hour and was documented on film. As they later revealed, the repetitive monotony of the action soon became boring after the initial sense of guilt and shock. Both reactions are obvious and reflect the character of money. On the one hand, its loss is painful as long as it can offer power and opportunity. On the other, since its value is not transmitted in the banknotes, these are hard to distinguish from worthless paper.
Drummond and Cauty’s action is powerful because it seeks to convey ex negativo the power of money, which is hard to understand in any other way. While other artists have created for this purpose symbols making to possible to meditate more or less successfully on huge sums, Drummond and Cauty brought their point home through destruction. While it is possible in the case of Hirst’s skull to talk about the hunger and illness that the money could have been used to combat, its waste by Drummond and Cauty is not only thinkable but also painfully experienced. Instead of an image, as it is with Hirst, death here is absolutely real. Even those who have only heard about the action feel sorrow at the lost opportunities. In this way, however, the power of capital explicitly becomes a subject. It has its epiphany in destruction, when its essence can really be experienced for an instant.

It is possible to talk about where the great art lies in this: in creating icons of capitalism and celebrating its power or in destroying the same. In either case, artists are capable of transforming money and large sums into subject matter and making at least approximately comprehensible what is otherwise incomprehensible, namely the transcendental dimension of modern capitalism. It is therefore an art that is not beautiful but is sublime, that is not edifying, ennobling or comforting but disconcerting, that makes the everyday dimensions obsolete and thus demands a certain degree of strength and serenity on the part of the viewer. It is not a friendly art capable of appealing to the majority but an art with which at most the successful minority in society can identify. It serves these movers and shakers of capitalism as a form of self-affirmation. They sense its driving force. But some also realize that for many people an art whose sole subject is money can no longer be accepted as such, and that we cannot go on with the celebration of capitalism at auctions.


(1) See Wolfgang Ullrich, Gesucht: Kunst! Phantombild eines Jokers, Berlin 2007, pp. 218 ff.

(2) Ibid., pp. 284 f.

(3) See Piroschka Dossi, Hype: Kunst und Geld, Munich 2007, p. 203.

(4) See Will Bennett, ‘Hirst’s Clearance Sale’, Daily Telegraph, 18 October 2004.

(5) Tom Morton, ‘Damien Hirst’, in Frieze, 109 (2007) (http://www.frieze.com/issue/review/damien_hirst1).

(6) Richard Dorment, ‘For the Love of Art and Money’, Daily Telegraph, 1 June 2007.

(7) See Nicolas Charlet, Yves Klein, Paris 2000, p. 70.

(8) See Nan Rosenthal, ‘Comic Relief – Artist Yves Klein – Into the Blue’, in Art Forum, Summer 1995.


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