Damien Hirst
Damien Hirst
Damien Steven Hirstis an English artist, entrepreneur, and art collector. He is the most prominent member of the group known as the Young British Artists, who dominated the art scene in the UK during the 1990s. He is internationally renowned, and is reportedly the United Kingdom's richest living artist, with his wealth valued at £215m in the 2010 Sunday Times Rich List. During the 1990s his career was closely linked with the collector Charles Saatchi, but increasing frictions came to...
NationalityBritish
ProfessionPainter
Date of Birth7 June 1965
Being best is a false goal, you have to measure success on your own terms.
So smoking is the perfect way to commit suicide without actually dying. I smoke because it's bad, it's really simple.
I realised that you couldn't use the tools of yesterday to communicate today's world. Basically, that was the big light that went on in my head.
I love color. I feel it inside me. It gives me a buzz.
I think suicide is the most perfect thing you can do in life.
It's very easy to say, 'I could have done that,' after someone's done it. But I did it. You didn't. It didn't exist until I did it.
But I'm more interested in why people are frightened by Jaws and why Jaws was such a hit than saying Spielberg's my main influence.
But whenever I look at the question of how to live, the answer's always staring me in the face. I'm already doing it.
The spot paintings, the spin paintings, they're all a mechanical way to avoid the actual guy in a room, myself, with a blank canvas.
I just hope that I can be kind of like the Beatles. I really like that kind of model. I like the way that without losing integrity they could change through fashion and not look back at the '60s and vomit when they saw what they'd done.
Whenever I've been well-known or hitting the press, I've always had to get my credit card out to prove I'm Damien Hirst.
Never let money get in the way of an idea
Even as a kid in drawing class, I had real ambition. I wanted to be the best in the class, but there was always some other feller who was better; so I thought, It cant be about being the best, it has to be about the drawing itself, what you do with it. Thats kind of stuck with me.
The infinite possibilities. That's what used to do my nut in.