Damien Hirst in vicious feud with teenage artist over a box of pencils
Millionaire gets young rival banned from galleries after taking exception to prank played on him
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How much is a box of pencils worth? Fifty pence? £3.99 if the pencils have rubbers on the ends? Well, if they're part of a Damien Hirst art installation, the value is £500,000. That is what 17-year-old graffiti artist Cartrain discovered when he pilfered some pencils from Hirst's sculpture Pharmacy. And that wasn't all – he was arrested, released on bail, and is waiting to find out if he will be formally charged with causing damage to an iconic artwork worth £10m.
When Cartrain walked into Tate Britain and made off with a few HBs in July, he believed it was a harmless game of tit-for-tat as part of an ongoing feud. He originally locked horns with the millionaire artist last year, when he used an image of Hirst's famous diamond-encrusted skull, For the Love of God, to create collages that were put up for sale on an art website.
Hirst reported him to the Design and Artists Copyright Society and a string of legal letters were sent to Cartrain's art dealer, Tom Cuthbert, at 100artworks.com, about the teenager's pieces, also called For the Love of God. The online gallery surrendered them to Hirst with a verbal apology.
Taking revenge, Cartrain took the box of pencils that were part of Hirst's sculpture, Pharmacy, which was being shown as part of its Classified exhibition that closed at the end of last month.
He then created a "wanted"-style poster that read: "For the safe return of Damien Hirst's pencils I would like my artworks back that DACS and Hirst took off me in November. It's not a large demand... Hirst has until the end of this month to resolve this or on 31 July the pencils will be sharpened. He has been warned."
Yesterday, Cartrain told The Independent: "I went to the Tate Britain and by chance had a golden opportunity to borrow a packet of pencils from the Pharmacy exhibit. That same day I made up a fake police appeal poster advertising that the pencils had been removed from the Tate and that if anyone had any information they should contact the police on the phone number advertised.
"A few weeks later I went out and I returned home to find out the art and antiques squad from New Scotland Yard had called round with a warrant for my arrest."
He was told by custody officers that the pencils were valued at £500,000 and that he had damaged "the concept of a public artwork titled Pharmacy ... valued at £10,000,000". Cartrain is on bail and, if convicted, his actions will feature among the highest value modern art thefts in Britain. The box of pencils – a very rare "Faber Castell dated 1990 Mongol 482 Series" – will be put back by Hirst, although the installation is no longer on public display.
But that is not the end of it. Police also arrested Cartrain's 49-year-old father, who they suspected of harbouring the pencils. "Initially, we arrested his dad but it soon became clear that it was his son who was responsible," said a police source. "We arranged to arrest him by appointment. The act of theft was clearly a stunt to gain publicity."
A statement from Tate Gallery confirmed: "On Saturday 4 July 2009, a member of the public removed a box of pencils from the desk in Damien Hirst's installation Pharmacy. The matter is being investigated by the police."
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Comments
The kid should be given an award. Surely his act of taking pencils and putting up ransom notes is a more worthy demonstration of art than a pretend corner shop.
What's next Hirst? A wendy house? Maybe a teepee full of turkeys to signify the lasting impression the pilgrims made on the Indians, perhaps staged inside a pretend drive through casino to symbolise the forgiveness of the pilgrims in return for tax free gambling land?
(I hold intellectual property to that last idea, actually sounds quite good reading it back...).
Hirst, you are less than nothing, you are entirely worthless and you dribbling morons who think you are so sophisticated by pretending to "appreciate" this crap are weeping pustules on the flabby backside of Western culture.
So Hirst is happy to steal elements of other people's work but not so happy when someone else does it to him.
This egotistical fool could fart in a room, call it Art, and attach a huge price-tag and expect people to pay to come and experience it. The really scary thing is there are a lot of gullible rich people who would, too!
They've made millions out of pencils....Hirst should be made to PAY!
The idea that because a box of pencils was put into an exhibit by Hirst makes them worth £500,000 is laughable; it is clear from this, is it not, that the Emperor is indeed naked?
1. The money is there. And obviously someone out there has offered, or actually paid, something like 500k for something like it.
2. It kind of all started about 100 years ago when artsits started making intentionally incomprehensible art. Dadaism etc. The trend really picked up after WW1. Then as now artists were essentially speaking to each other. The ordinary ordinary could not relate to their arguments to begin with. They were creating for each other. Back then people wouldn't throw Soutine a rotten apple. Dadaism etc were meant as a protest againts the insanity people were starting to be confronted with early this century. Long before the M.A.D. defence. But, yes Damien Hirst makes intresting peices, sometimes. But causing that much harm to a child by arresting him is unforgivable.
aka
Talentless muppet has tantrum after being out-thought by a child.
Then why on earth is there not something worth that much on sale? I think its because artist have nothing left to say. We've said all we could since world war 1 and we still ended up with Mutually Assured Destruction. I do mean nothing pertinent. We say impertinant things every day. And oddly somebody picked up on how much people wanted to hear artists say impertinant things. Then is it really a surprise when Mr Hirst is out for blood when a 17 year old graff artist makes a fool of him? His reputation is his livelyhood. Should he lose face he could find himself paying off his debts until the day he dies.
Cartrain is a gifted, insightful lad. I admire him.
Hirst ,if he has any morality, unlikely as portrayed by his present behaviour, he might well remember the attitude of Marcel Duchamp. the conceptual principles of whom Hirst plagiarises endlessly. When ,after 40 years, Duchamps glass painting 'The Rape Of The Bride By The Seven Brothers was taken out of its packaging it was found to be smashed. Appalled, the exhibiters approached Duchamp with the news. He is said to have told them that, in a dream, he had seen the work in its therefore entirely acceptable present state. Perhaps Hirst might see that Cartrains act is an artisitic development of his work.
£500,000 divided by 12 (number of pencils in a box). This gives the price per component part of the overall value of the whole. £500,000 divided by 12 is £41,667. Then you multiply 41667 by the number of component pieces in your own artwork. In my case there are 459 component mosaic tiles. So 41667 x 459 = £19,125,153. Then you need to divide this number by ten (because unestablished people are ten times less important than famous people), so that brings the price down to £1,912,515. Next you need to square root the price (keeping it real factor/greed checker), which further reduces the price to £1,383. This figure determines how much your artwork should provide you with to live on each year. Then you subtract your age from the average life expectancy according to your gender and nationality. In my case this would give a figure of 41 (76-35). Then you multiply your annual art earnings by the number of years you can expect to be alive (1383 x 41) and then multiply that by 1.4, to take account of the income tax that you will need to pay. So my artwork comes in at £79,384.
Or nearest offer
See the artwork here: http://www.colonpress.com/
Graeme
Of course, practically any other artist I know would have a really hard time making this itemization. Imagine someone like Turner or Lucien Freud trying to itemize the price of every brushstroke or how much each square inch would be worth. They'd laugh and say the price is for the whole piece, the whole is worth more than the parts. A box of pencils IN Pharmacy can't be valued as separate, because the moment they are apart from the larger work it's a just a box of pencils. I find it very hard to believe they are so rare that another box can't replace them, and so their value should be no more than their street or market value. A bit of a work of art has considerably less, if any value, and if the reverse were true than artists could dismember and run their works through the shredder and sell each piece at a clean percentage of the work's original price.
How I hate "investment" art.
Of course I'll have to stand corrected if someone who works with art insurance can point out how I'm wrong.