The now not-so-young British artist Damien Hirst was in fine form on a recent podcast—Waldy and Bendy’s Adventures in Art—spilling the beans on the people who matter to him the most (and those who don’t).
Asked about the most influential person he has ever met, Hirst says: “Joe Hage, my manager. He’s [Gerhard] Richter’s manager, he manages the [Francis] Bacon estate, he manages Peter Doig. He’s very quiet, lives in the shadows.”
The pod’s co-host Waldemar Januszczak also asked if the Brit artist is still working with Gagosian and White Cube galleries. “I’m not really sure how that stuff works anymore,” Hirst said. “The galleries have a function… they’re only estate agents and a lot of estate agents think they own everything because they have the keys to the house.”
Hirst also revealed his latest project: a grotto encrusted with 150 tonnes of amethyst that he created for Mark Getty, the younger son of John Paul Getty Jr, at the family’s Wormsley estate in southern England.