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Damien Hirst Swaps Pickled Sharks for Paintbrush

London, UK – Damien Hirst has made a fortune and become an art-world brand by peering at life’s dark side.

Rows of skulls stare sightless from deep blue backgrounds in the new exhibition by the man who turned pickled sharks and rotting cows’ heads into multimillion-dollar works of art.

“I got called morbid at school,” Hirst said Tuesday ahead of the show’s opening at London’s Wallace Collection. "I used to borrow the teacher’s red pen to draw the blood on severed limbs.

“I like looking into the darkness. It fills me with wanting to live,” added the 44-year-old former enfant terrible of British art. “The further into the darkness you look, the brighter the brightness becomes.”

The most striking thing about the show, “No Love Lost,” isn’t the skulls – Hirst’s work has long dwelled on mortality and decay. The surprise is that these are paintings, executed in oil by Hirst himself.

After gaining fame as a Britart bad boy in the 1990s, Hirst became an industry, employing dozens of assistants to create signature works such as multicolored dot paintings and rows of pill bottles in medicine cabinets.

Some critics carped that Hirst’s factory-scale output devalued his work – a criticism Hirst says is misguided.

“Architects don’t build their own houses,” he said. "That’s a criticism of craft, really, not of art.

“People want something made by the actual artist. But in terms of art, I don’t like that. I just want a beautiful object.”

In any case, prices for Hirst’s work soared. A Sotheby’s auction last year netted almost $200 million, a record for a living artist. A buyer paid $17 million for a shark preserved in formaldehyde, and an embalmed calf with golden hoofs sold for $18.5 million.

The two-day sale began on Sept. 15, 2008 – the day Lehman Brothers bank collapsed and the global economy tipped into crisis. That timing has made the auction seem like the end of an era, the twilight of a long art-market boom.

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