The World's Wealthiest Artists?
By Amber Vilas
Published: February 18, 2010


The Sunday Times estimates that Damien Hirst's fortune stands at £200 million, though some sources say it could be considerably larger.

NEW YORK— It is not easy to make a living as an artist. Even as the market for contemporary art has expanded in the past 50 years — then recently contracted, only to begin expanding again — a mere handful of artists have made considerably amounts of money during their lifetimes. But those who have succeeded have done quite well indeed.

British artist Damien Hirst's enormous wealth has become part of his persona as an artist, uniting him with the super-rich collectors he alternately celebrates and satirizes in his work, but he is only the most visible example of this growing affluence sector. The art world, being the room of smoke and mirrors that it is, makes figuring out personal wealth tricky business — after all, the stratospheric auction prices that grab headlines end up lining the pockets of sellers and auction houses, not artists. (This is this traditional case, with one noted exception below.) And when prices for works offered in galleries are made public, one never knows what cut the artist is taking home (plus that initial price tag often shrinks before the sale is negotiated, drastically so in recessionary times).

Nevertheless, it's possible to draw some conclusions based on public information (and careful inquiries into back room sources). Below, find eight of the art world's wealthiest.

Damien Hirst
Most likely the world’s richest artist, Hirst, 44, seems to turn everything he touches into gold. The 2009 Rich List published by the UK’s Sunday Times estimated Hirst’s fortune to be an impressive $388 million. That was up $110 million from 2007, and now several sources close to the artist claim that the Hirst's wealth has shot over the billion mark in U.S. currency. In 2008, when he sold a complete show of 223 works at Sotheby's in London — the sale (and performance-art masterstroke) was titled “Beautiful Inside My Head Forever” — the high-water mark of the boom years raised $198 million, breaking the record for a single-artist auction. The sale also broke Hirst’s own auction record when the Golden Calf sold for $16 million. Dramatically, and somewhat controversially, the fact that Hirst sold his work directly through Sotheby's — a taboo in the art world, where artists rarely even appear in the salesroom when their work goes under the hammer — meant that he received the lions share of his winnings. And who can forget For the Love of God, 2007, the human skull that Hirst recreated in platinum and 8,601 diamonds? It sold for a whopping $77.9 million — never mind that Hirst, a dedicated showman, was himself a part of the consortium that bought the work. A consummate financier who runs nearly a dozen sundry businesses on the side, Hirst also is also one of the rare artists that has a personal business manager: Frank Dunphy, who has been with him for more than a decade.



Jeff Koons
With New York art critic Jerry Saltz hailing the Koons's sculpture Puppy as the last decade's greatest artwork, and a solo exhibition of the artist's obsessively crafted works shown last year at Versailles, there is no doubt that Koons is an art-world superstar. Known for having the highest standards of craftsmanship, he almost bankrupted Jeffrey Deitch in the 1990s when the New York dealer decided to back the creation of Koon’s "Celebration" series of gigantic stainless steel baubles, such as bows and heart-shaped lockets. (Deitch was eventually bailed out by Sotheby's.) Larry Gagosian has been a longtime supporter, buying one edition of the Hanging Heart for $23.6 million when it went on sale at Sotheby's, and he deals the artist's work on the primary market as well. A former commodities trader on Wall Street who knows how to leverage his value — the sale of Hanging Heart briefly made him the most expensive artist alive — Koons has come a long way since he first began working out of a SoHo loft on the corner of Houston and Broadway in New York. He now enjoys a sprawling, factory-like studio in Chelsea, staffed by over 120 people.

Takashi Murakami
The Japanese "Superflat" artist went the way of Hirst and Koons when he established an art factory of his own, Hiropon, in 1996. Now called Kaikai Kiki Co. Ltd., with spaces in Tokyo and Long Island City, Queens, his company has more than 100 employees working on his paintings, sculptures, Louis Vuitton bags, inflatable balloons, videos, T-shirts, key chains, and plush toys. He has an impressive output, sometimes pushing things to the point that assistants are finishing a painting at the opening of the exhibition. Also like Hirst and Koons, he showed his predilection for flashy, expensive artwork when he teamed up with Pharrell Williams to create The Simple Things, a large-scale sculpture that sold for more than $2 million at last year's Art Basel fair in Switzerland. Taking almost two years to develop and produce, the sculpture uses his trademark character Mr. DOB, with the rap impresario's favorite objects (a cupcake and bottle of baby oil, for instance) made out of 18-karat gold and set with more than 26,000 diamonds, rubies, emeralds and sapphires resting in his open mouth. Like Hirst, whom Murakami has called his "star," the artist has courted controversy with his unabashed commercialism. In 2007 Murakami, who has lucratively collaborated with Luis Vuitton on much-in-demand handbag designs, opened an exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles that featured an special Vuitton gift shop. Tellingly, the exhibition was titled "© Murakami."



Brice Marden
An painter who first became known for his monochrome paintings that he made in the 1970s, Brice Marden emerged as one of the most in-demand artists of the period, thanks in part to his representation by hard-driving New York dealer Mary Boone. In recent decades his work has changed to accommodate sinuous, winding brushstrokes, and his reputation has continued to grow, with his prices remaining high. But Marden's real wealth is said to come from his real estate holdings. An early denizen of New York's once-dilapidated SoHo neighborhood, the painter supposedly bought up a huge swath of the area's real estate at basement prices — only to see the properties skyrocket over time. His real-estate holdings now include an estate in Tivoli, N.Y., (called Rose Hill), a Manhattan studio with 5,000 square feet of space, a nearby town house, a house and studio on the Greek island of Hydra, and a hotel in Nevis, an island in the West Indies.



Julian Schnabel
The iconic New York artist and filmmaker has some impressive real-estate holdings of his own. In addition to maintaining studios in New York City and in Montauk, he has a house in San Sebastian in Spain. Schnabel began to use what would become his famous (or notorious) New York residence, the pink-clad Palazzo Chupi in the West Village, as an art studio back in 1987. He bought the vibrant stucco building in 1997, then renovated it and sold off apartments to his celebrity friends like Richard Gere, who bought his at a steal for $12 million when housing prices were down in 2007. A painter whose fame and high prices were legend in the 1980s — also under the auspices of dealer Mary Boone — his market as taken a hit over the years, but he continues to make and sell work and has dramatically reinvented himself as one of the most admired figures in the lucrative profession of filmmaking.



Anish Kapoor
Kapoor, 55, made a $27 million profit in 2008, taking the fortune he has made from his art to an estimated $62.7 million. The Turner Prize-winning sculptor joined Hirst on the 2010 Sunday Times Rich List, and is currently debating whether to add a $8 million country house in the Berkshire Downs to his assets. The Times pointed out that the artist owns a number of luxury houses, including a $4.2 million newly-built home in London's Chelsea, a $6.2 million townhouse in Lincoln’s Inn Fields, and a $3.1 million property in the Bahamas. Last year, 29 of his works sold at auction for a total of $8.6 million.



Jasper Johns
Johns, 78, is a celebrated American artist whose paintings can be counted on to bring in constantly high prices at auction. In 1998, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York acquired Johns' White Flag for an undisclosed sum, but the work was estimated at a value of more than $20 million. In 2006, collectors Anne and Kenneth Griffin bought the artist’s painting False Start for $80 million. The canvas, with splotches of red, yellow, and blue paint, currently holds the title for the most expensive painting by a living artist. Skate’s Art Market Research’s index of the thousand most valuable works of art sold at auction contains seven of the artist’s works. Since the 1980’s, Johns's production has slowed and now produces no more than a handful of paintings each year. The decreased output seems not to have adversely affected the artist, whose demand just seems to keep rising.