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When Oliver Met Damien, There Was an Auction

February 6, 2012 by Marion Maneker

Oliver Barker participates in the Financial Times’s guest diary column. The installments produce the usual anodyne praise of colleagues and a well-balanced work and home life. But the opportunity to put down this great story is well worth the effort:

My relationship with Damien goes back to 2003. When travelling on the Number 94 bus into work, I spotted the fixtures and fittings of Pharmacy restaurant being removed and placed in storage. I couldn’t get the idea of an auction sale of the décor —all designed by Hirst and from this iconic celebrity hangout—out of my head. So I called Damien, proposed it, and the reist history. The auction made £11.1m, three times the estimate, and earned me my first “white gloves” —and  auctioneer’s tradition whereby a pair of white gloves is brought to the auctioneer on the rostrum immediately aft the final hammer comes down on the last lot of a sale in which everything has sold.

Diary of a Somebody: Oliver Barker (Financial Times)

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Filed Under: Artists Tagged With: Damien Hirst, Oliver Barker, Sotheby's

About Marion Maneker

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