What does a top British artist earn?

Last year the highest-earning British artist was Damien Hirst, the creator who cuts up dead sharks and puts them in formaldehyde. He pulled in twelve million British pounds last year (over twenty million dollars), although dealer’s commissions may have eaten into this figure. As an aside, many buyers of Hirst’s early dot paintings, see the link for an image, are unhappy because most of those works were made with ordinary household paints and are now falling apart.

A close second on the earnings list was Andrew Vicari, now resident in Monte Carlo, since 1974 he has been the official painter to the Saudi Royal Family.

What a pair. Hirst I admire for his visceral impact but I could not live with most of his works, not the least because some of them involve live, buzzing insects. Would you wish to own “the beauty of a disused shop full of butterfly pupae, hatching from white canvases, feeding on sugar syrup, mating, laying eggs and dying”? Or rather would you call the exterminator to get rid of something like that?

I wouldn’t hang a Vicari on my walls, check out his painting of the first Gulf War. I now have a better understanding why the Saudi Royal Family is in such trouble.

But let us look at the bright side. No one (well, hardly anyone) ever said capitalism was about rewarding people in accord with their merits. An unequal distribution of rewards is part of the system that generates more diverse art of many kinds, click here to see a compelling portrait by Lucien Freud, or here for a broader choice of images. Click here for a sparkling Howard Hodgkin, here for a broader choice of Hodgkin images, which always bring a splash of color. They are the British painters I will buy when they start paying bloggers.

The earnings information is from The Art Newspaper, one of the highest quality periodicals of any kind.