For more than a decade, Damien Hirst has been one of the richest and most famous artists in the world. All the same, when you sit down with him, he still seems surprised by it. "I grew up with quite an impoverished background," he says. "I didn't see any possibility that I would ever get paid for doing anything I enjoyed." He tells me this one rainy afternoon in July at one of his many studios. When he says it, I think immediately about the bull in the next room. I'm pretty sure he enjoyed coming up with it. I'm very sure he's about to be paid for it. A lot, actually. The bull is called The Golden Calf, and it's headed to market at Sotheby's auction house in London, where it will be the star of a two-day sale of 223 works by Hirst that begins Sept. 15. This will be the first time any auction house has sold a quantity of work fresh from an artist's studio. As auction prices for contemporary art have rocketed ever higher, galleries have been dreading this very possibility, that a well-known artist would bypass his dealers-who usually get a cut of roughly half of a work's sale price-and make straight for the auction houses and the auction money.
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