Jackie Wullschlager sits down with Jay Jopling for Lunch with the FT. Jopling hasn’t given an interview for 10 years. In this one, he explains how he convinced Christie’s to give him a rent-free start as a gallerist and why Damien Hirst showed up at his house five hours after leaving him at 4am:
“So many galleries encourage the art to chase the money; it’s much more interesting when it’s the other way round. The art market model has changed hugely in the past 20 years. I don’t know how old you are” – this is a courtesy; he is a year younger than me – “but I remember when London contemporary art was just [the dealers] Waddingtons, d’Offay, Karsten Schubert, Maureen Paley. After Nick Serota became Tate director [in 1988], he called a meeting because he was concerned about the media lampooning contemporary art. I was very flattered to be asked. Damien had just done a fish cabinet, I invited the tabloids, the Daily Star took a photograph with a bag of chips and ran the headline ‘The world’s most expensive fish and chips’. I thought it didn’t matter if the tabloids were negative – they’d force people to take a view, bring contemporary art to people’s attention. All that is redundant now – artists are household names, part of people’s lives. I certainly didn’t imagine when we started that it would be a business like this.”
Lunch with the FT: Jay Jopling (Financial Times)
