‘Let’s say his detractors point out that there’s nothing he’s done that someone else didn’t do first. A bloke called Ernie Saunders had a preserved shark—which he’d actually caught himself—on the wall of his shop in Shoreditch in 1989, two years before young Damien even placed the order for his dead fish. It was exhibited in 2003 in a gallery run by the Stuckists under the title
A Dead Shark Isn’t Art
.’
‘Stuckists?’
‘The Stuckists have a quaint old-fashioned view that artists should be able to draw and paint, and rightly dismiss conceptual art as pretentious, specious, nihilistic rubbish. The name is courtesy of Tracey Emin herself, who once shrieked ‘“tuck! Stuck! Stuck!” at an artistic boyfriend whose painting was insufficiently avant garde for her taste.’
‘Did anyone buy Saunders’ shark?’
‘Of course not. He offered it for a bargain million quid, pointing out that would save the buyer of his pickled shark more than five mill compared to what he described as “the Damien Hirst copy”, but there were no takers.’
‘Hirst was a brand by then, hon,’ explained Mary Lou. ‘As far as the art establishment was concerned, he had a monopoly on dead fish and animals.’
The baroness emitted another snort. ‘Even though a bloke called John LeKay, whom he was very close to for a while, had exhibited animal carcasses years before Hirst produced his cattle. And lent him a science catalogue showing a cow bisected lengthways which inspired
Mother and Child, Divided.
’
She leaned forward and shook her finger at Pooley. ‘Then there was the sculpture,
Hymn
, a hugely enlarged version of a torso from his son’s anatomy set, which bore a startling resemblance to
Yin and Yang
, an anatomical torso exhibited a few years earlier by LeKay. Hirst had a bit of a setback here. Out of the million he got for
Hymn
, he had to cough up quite a bit because the toy manufacturer and the toy designer had complained about breach of copyright.
‘Now, Ellis, are you still paying attention?’
‘Yes, ma’am.’
‘You must remember Hirst flogging a skull covered with diamonds.’
‘Now you mention it, I do. Nasty-looking, vulgar thing.’
‘During the time he was most friendly with Hirst, poor old John LeKay had constructed skulls made of soap and wax and adorned them with artificial diamonds and Swarovski crystals. He sold them for around a thousand quid. Hirst had a skull made out of platinum, had someone stick about fifteen million quid’s worth of diamonds on it, called it
For the Love of God
and demanded fifty mill. Didn’t quite get all of that. It ended up with a consortium that included him. But don’t worry about Damien. The lad’s a multi-multi-multi-millionaire. Unlike John LeKay.
‘Which leads me neatly to the multi-coloured spots.’
‘Which you will daub all over his body,’ said Mary Lou.
‘Certainly not. Which I will have daubed by an assistant. I’m not one for unnecessary physical labour, as you know.’
‘I’d be surprised if Hirst was the first artist to paint spots,’ said Pooley.
‘You mean to have spots painted in his name,’ added Amiss.
‘And you’d both be right. Yes, it’s an old idea and yes, he wasn’t any good at it. Indeed he described the few spots he painted himself as “shite.” But his industrious assistants produced many hundreds of spot canvases, which have earned their employer millions.’
‘At least he’s honest,’ said Amiss.
‘Candid would be a better word, Robert. But I will admit Damien can sometimes be almost endearing. He once explained that the best spot painting “you could have by me” would be one painted by his assistant Rachel. And when an interviewer pointed out to him that other artists claimed he had stolen their ideas, Hirst’s response was: “Fuck ‘em all!” Why
should
he care? There’s no copyright on ideas.’
‘Has the art establishment ever shown any signs of worry about all this?’ asked Amiss.
‘Worry?’ said the baroness in her best Lady Bracknell voice. ‘Worry? This month that ghastly Gasgosian creature stuffed the eleven galleries he’s got dotted around smart bits of the world with a global exhibition called
The Complete Spot Paintings of Damien Hirst, 1986-2011
. All the small, medium, and big spots your little heart could desire.’ She emitted a heavy sigh.
‘While you’re at it, don’t forget about Tate Britain,’ said Mary Lou.
The baroness took an enormous silk handkerchief from the recesses of her kaftan, mopped her brow theatrically, breathed deeply a few times and had a draught of martini. ‘I will be calm. Yes, Tate Britain! ’ She breathed deeply again. ‘You and I might think that since this lucky museum owns a magnificent collection of British art since 1500, it might show us the best of it. But Sclerota’s in charge of that too. Last time I was there, pre-twentieth century art was restricted to a few rooms. Modern tat was rampant.’ There was another heavy sigh. ‘I suppose we should be grateful that Sclerota didn’t insist that in this year of the Olympics, as the world focuses on London, Tat Britain should be cluttered up for five months with an enormous Damien Hirst retrospective. No. Reason has prevailed. It’s Tat Modern that’s hosting his rubbish. Mind you, it’s having to have its floor reinforced at great expense because huge vitrines of formaldehyde and assorted animal carcasses weigh a lot.’
‘You’re looking baffled, Robert,’ said Mary Lou.
‘I just don’t understand why people are taken in.’
‘Having hailed the talentless as talents in the first place, their reputations are at stake. How can all these critics and curators who’ve hailed Hirst as a genius fess up?’
‘Besides, if dealers and collectors were to admit the emperors were naked,’ said the baroness, ‘they’d lose their own shirts’. She sniggered. ‘Did you hear that story about the arch-luvvie, the play director Sir Trevor Nunn? Apparently, he bought one of Hirst’s spin paintings…’
‘What are they?’ asked Pooley, wearily. ‘And whom did he nick the idea from?’
‘You dribble paint onto a revolving surface and see what happens. Artists—including, inevitably, John LeKay—have been doing this for decades. Hirst added motors to speed up his assistants’ production line. Eventually Nunn met Hirst at a party and told him he had one of his spin paintings. Hirst asked the title and the price. Now Nunn had bought this before Hirst’s prices went stratospheric, so he’d paid a mere twenty-seven thousand quid. A delighted Hirst then confided that this painting was the work of his two-year-old son, with some help from a ten-year-old pal. Nunn got over his disappointment when he later sold the thing for nearly fifty thou.’
‘They’re all mad,’ said Pooley.
‘It’s a madness that’s made a lot of them rich. Take the case of the journalist, A. A. Gill. In 2007, he asked Christie’s to auction a painting of Joseph Stalin for which he’d originally paid two hundred. When they refused, on the grounds that they didn’t deal in Hitler or Stalin, the cunning sod asked if they’d sell Stalin by Hirst or Warhol and they said they certainly would. Sadly, Warhol was dead, so Gill had to make do with his mate Hirst, who agreed to paint a red nose on Stalin and signed it. It went for a hundred-and-forty-thousand.’
‘I’m speechless,’ said Pooley.
‘Just as well,’ said the baroness. ‘Less competition for me.’
‘We’ve wandered a long way from your method of disposing of Hirst, Jack,’ said Amiss. ‘Will he have diamonds stuck to his head?’
‘Certainly not. Unlike Hirst, I’m not made of money. But I’ll have his orifices stuffed with cigarette butts.’
‘Why cigarette butts?’ asked Pooley.
‘He’s flogged cabinets full of them.’
‘I thought he flogged cabinets full of pills,’ said Amiss.
The baroness clicked her tongue. ‘He did indeed. As—again—had been done before him. Hirst and many of his contemporaries claim to be original in their use of commonplace objects, when they’re just providing variations on what Marcel Duchamp thought of nearly a century ago. They burble these days about being in the vanguard of transgressive art…’
‘What’s that?’ asked Pooley.
‘Art that pushes the boundaries and has the knickers of the bourgeoisie in a right old twist. I’ve nothing against that myself. I sometimes fancy a bit of transgression. However, the point is that all this was done by the Dadaists after the first war and Marcel Duchamp, whom one might term the Dada of them all, had most of the ideas that the YBAs pass off as their own. Take the Hirst Stalin. One of Duchamp’s japes was to paint a moustache and goatee on a reproduction of the Mona Lisa and exhibit it. It was Duchamp who announced that objects he called “readymades” were art.’ She paused. ‘Well, him being a frog, he called them “
ob-jets trou-vés
.” He kicked off with a bicycle wheel and a bottle rack. Then came the urinal.
‘Stop looking so depressed, Ellis. It gets worse. Duchamp bought a urinal from an ironworks called Mott, called it Fountain, signed it R. Mutt and tried to exhibit it. It was rejected, but later became the icon of conceptual art, since Duchamp’s message was that anything he said was art, was art. “I declare myself an artist, and so anything I say is art is art” became an immutable law. Actually, Duchamp was making a case for artistic freedom and he was also making a joke, but the law of unintended consequences gives us Hirst and his chums and an art establishment bowing down before them.’
‘Like the Israelites worshipping the Golden Calf,’ suggested Pooley.
‘Funny you should mention that. Hirst gold-plated a calf’s hooves and horns, called it the Golden Calf, and flogged it for nine mill.’
Pooley groaned.
‘Fill us in on the cigarette butts,’ requested Amiss.
‘Hirst branched out into butts. Standing butts and lying-down butts carefully arranged by his loyal workforce. Some of the cabinets were edged in gold to appeal to Arabs. They went for hundreds of thousands of smackers.’
Amiss sighed. ‘The older I get, the more it’s borne upon me that there’s one born every minute.’
‘In the case of Mr. Hirst,’ guffawed the baroness, ‘he also believes that you should never give a sucker an even break. Especially if the sucker is rich. In that regard he does have a touch of genius. He’s an alchemist: he takes base metal and turns it into gold.’
‘Well at least what you’ve been planning is pretty original, Jack. I don’t think even Hirst has come up with snuff installations before now,’ said Amiss.
Mary Lou laughed. ‘Jack, didn’t you once suggest suffocating Jeff Koons in a giant plastic inflatable penis and sticking him outside some museum?’
‘I most certainly did. I settled on Washington’s Museum of Crime and Punishment as the location.’ The baroness looked pensive. ‘But I could never decide on quite the right title for the work. Obviously, I thought of
Dick
, but I’d reserved
Dickhead
for my creation combining real bits of that Quinn bloke who won fame with the sculpture of his head made from his frozen blood.’ She glanced at Pooley. ‘Come on, Ellis. You’re off-duty. Stop looking down your nose like a Reverend Mother who’s discovered the novices having an orgy in the cloister, and choose a so-called artist to rub out.’
‘It would have to be the ghastly Emin.’
‘Predictable, but nonetheless a good choice. We would be well rid of her maudlin narcissistic ramblings about her gynaecological workings. How would you dispose of her?’
‘Wrap her up in her unmade bed and roll it down a cliff?’
‘That’s a bit unimaginative by your standards, Ellis,’ said Amiss. ‘What’s the point of reading all those crime novels if you end up with such a pedestrian method of murder. Think Edgar Wallace.’
Pooley took a small sip of his martini and concentrated hard. ‘OK. Poison her pudding with the cholera bacterium and claim she caught it because of her insanitary habits.’
‘But what would you call this work of art?’ asked Amiss.
The brooding silence that followed was broken by the baroness. ‘I have it. Crown her with a neon light flashing
Just Deserts
. And not with a double “s”’.
‘I’m getting into the spirit of this,’ said Amiss. ‘Can we create a giant Campbell’s can full of soup and drown Andy Warhol in it? And yes, yes, I know he’s dead but we could exhume him.’
‘And call it
You say tomato and I say die
?’ suggested Mary-Lou.
‘Tempting though it would be to settle scores with any number of dead frauds,’ said the baroness, ‘I’m a busy woman and there simply isn’t enough time. We have to stick to the living.’
‘Can we get back to why you’ve concluded that artists are the wrong targets?’ asked Mary Lou. ‘You’ve strayed a long way from where you started.’
‘I know you interrogate people for a living these days, Mary Lou, but it would be a shame were this to prevent us from dallying a while in conversational byways.’
‘At the rate we’re going,’ said Mary Lou, ‘we’ll never even get a glimpse of the highway.’
The baroness looked at her watch. ‘Wait till we’ve eaten. Now where the hell is Rachel? Ring her, Robert, and tell her to hurry up. If she’s not here in five minutes we’ll go in to dinner without her. I’m damned if I’m going to put the artichoke and goat’s cheese soufflé in jeopardy. It’s taken three arguments with the chef to get it quite right. The fellow’s congenitally unsound on the chili issue.’
As Amiss headed for the door with his phone at the ready, she shouted after him: ‘Tell her it’s an emergency: the martini jug is empty.’
Disaster was averted when Amiss’ wife arrived in the bar just in time, accepted with equanimity that the baroness considered her tube train breaking down an inadequate excuse for missing martinis, and the soufflé and all that followed were such a success that even the baroness could find no fault. The marrowbone stew with herb dumplings had caused her so much ecstasy she had been moved to charge into the kitchen to congratulate everyone. In the interstices of criticising her guests for insufficiently attending to their food and wine, she listened with surprising attentiveness to Rachel’s account of what life was like as a probationary teacher in a London comprehensive.