Kelly Devine Thomas

My interview with Damien Hirst (ARTnews, May 2005) long before he covered a skull with diamonds and sold it for $100 million, becoming the most expensive living artist (we think):

On a morning prior to the opening of Damien Hirst’s first all-paintings exhibition at Gagosian Gallery in New York last March, one of his assistants, a young girl in a red apron, lay on her stomach finishing off a pink pill in a pharmaceutical painting. Another assistant painted a black asterisk on a canvas, reproducing the logo of the antianxiety drug Ativan. Open Heineken bottles––one sporting a white glove puppet––sat on a worktable next to an unopened carton of orange juice. Hirst, the most famous of the Young British Artists, who will turn 40 next month,was nowhere to be found. His publicist had lost track of him.

Download the article here.