A few weeks ago there was a thread about modern art which made me feel I was an over cynical old man. I read the following in a paper today.
This reveals something I think. Vindicated perhaps?
IN THIS ISSUE
News from the art world
Hirst’s Government handouts
By some estimates, Damien Hirst is “the world’s richest artist”, said Richard Eden in the Daily Mail. He has an estimated fortune of around £300m, owns a 14-bedroom house in Regent’s Park, and has been known to give seats on private jets to his pet bulldog. “None of that, however, deterred him from turning to the hard-pressed taxpayer during the pandemic.” According to the accounts for his company, Science (UK), it claimed £1.31m in furlough payments from the Covid job-retention scheme in 2020 – a year in which it turned over a total of £18.2m. The business also received a £15m business-interruption loan from the Government. Nevertheless, said Anny Shaw in The Art Newspaper, Hirst laid off 63 studio employees in October 2020, after a planned retrospective of his work in China was cancelled. The cancellation forced him “to remodel his business, pausing the production of new works and concentrating on the sale of existing pieces”. He fired a third of his workforce, mostly based in Dudbridge, Gloucestershire.
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