"Banks fall over, art triumphs."

This week started with an ominous bang. It was "Black Monday" for bankers, financiers and investors at all wealth levels as a big chunk of the U.S. banking system imploded. The week has been tough on the Republican presidential candidate and war-lovin' (which means deeper debt-spendin') Senator John McCain, too. The George W. Bush clone has found himself scrambling to criticize the mismanagement that led to the demise of Lehman Brothers and Merrill Lynch, blaming the latest, alarming developments on "unbridled corruption and greed," even as - typically - he avoided reality and steered clear of recognizing that Republican policies since the Reagan era that have deregulated American corporations and let them get away with just about everything, including not paying their fair share of taxes, have been hugely responsible for the greedfest Wall Street's money movers have long enjoyed. Until now.Hirst's "The Golden Calf," a bull preserved in a tank of formaldehyde, with its head crowned by a gold disc, sold for the equivalent of almost $18.4 million at this week's auction in London. Despite the widespread, painful fallout from "Black Monday," at least one big risk-taker has scored triumphantly in the money game, proving that it still can be done - with art, though, not with stocks or subprime mortgages or debt-to-be-repaid of dubious value acquired from countless secondary or more-distant sources.

That's the British artist Damien Hirst, who brought to a two-part Sotheby's auction sale in London on Monday and Tuesday a batch of his older works and some all-new works. (The auction bore the title "Beautiful Inside My Head Forever.") In doing so, Hirst broke with a long-established protocol in the international art market, according to which artworks are normally sold at auction by collectors who had purchased them from commercial galleries or from earlier auctions. In bringing his works to auction himself, Hirst completely bypassed his usual dealers at blue-chip galleries in London and New York.

As the Sun, referring to the artist who is "best known for suspending a shark in a tank of formaldehyde" inimitably puts it in a headline, Hirst's Sotheby's success was a case of "Shark 'n' Awe." The controversy-loving British tabloid reports that Hirst "smashed records by raking in £111 MILLION [$198.7 million] from an auction of his crackpot artworks. The payday was TEN TIMES more than the previous high for a sale of pieces by a single artist, Sotheby's said." The results of the sale "stunned Hirst," who had "feared the [current, worldwide] credit crunch would scare off collectors." The 43-year-old artist observed: "I'm totally amazed that my art is selling while banks are falling."Earlier this month, British artist Damien Hirst posed in front of his work, "The Incredible Journey" (a zebra in a tank of formaldehyde), which was offered for sale in this week's auction.

The Sun adds: "The top-priced item in the two-day auction was 'The Golden Calf,' one of the artist's notorious works featuring pickled animals. It went for £10.3 million [$18.4 million], the highest price paid to date for a Hirst at auction. A dead tiger shark in a tank called 'The Kingdom' sold for £9.5 million [almost $17 million]....And even 'The Abyss' - a collection of [cigarette] butts - fetched £1.8million [$3.2 million]." Other Hirst works in the sale featured butterflies. Last night, the Scotsman reports, Hirst "said 'people would rather put their money into butterflies than banks' after economic gloom failed to dampen enthusiasm for his work."
One bidder in the Sotheby's sale said of Hirst's artwork: "It is iconic, inherently British....His work challenges people, and visually it is stunning." However, Reuters reports, Hirst's creations are "not to everyone's taste." The news agency quotes Charles Thomson, a co-founder of theStuckist figurative-art movement, who remarked: "The art world has gone stark, raving bonkers. It is akin to a fever, a plague people have caught. It won't last forever." The above photo, not from this week's London auction, shows Hirst's "Away from the Flock" as it was displayed earlier this year at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Commenting on the Hirst auction after the first night of the sale, Sir Norman Rosenthal, the former exhibitions director at the Royal Academy of Arts in London, told the Guardian: "Banks fall over, art triumphs."
Of the activity in the Sotheby's salesroom on the first evening of the two-part sale, the Guardiannoted: "Like asteroids on an inexorable collision course, the spectacular sale had converged on the most spectacular bank collapse of the century: in the buzz of chatter in Italian, German and French before the sale, the question was whether there would be any millionaires left in the swirling clouds of space dust for Hirst to pick off. There were, but they were hiding at the end of telephone lines or in the private boardrooms sheltering some of Sotheby's very favorite customers....On the big lots, the bidders in the room, almost all with mobiles clamped to their ears as they gambled somebody else's money, dropped out pathetically early at about the £1 [million] mark, leaving the battlefield to the anonymous voices on the banks of phones."As he took in the results of the second session of the Sotheby's auction, Hirst said: "I guess it means that people would rather put their money into butterflies than banks - seems like a better world today to me." (Sun).