Tag Archives: Damien Hirst

The 15 Richest Living Artists

Posted by Richard M on

 

Last week we reported about David Choe being paid in 2005 in stock by Facebook, for painting murals in their offices. That stock might become worth 200 Million USD, after Facebook’s IPO and official stock market listing. Complex took a look at the richest living artists, and it is interesting to see where Choe ranks in there now.

Here is the complete list:

  1. Damien Hirst – 1 Billion USD
  2. Jeff Koons – 500 Million USD
  3. Jasper Johns – 300 Million USD
  4. David Choe – 200 Million USD
  5. Andre Vicari – 142 Million USD
  6. Takashi Murakami – 100 Million USD
  7. Anish Kapoor – 85 Million USD
  8. Antony Gormley – 50 Million USD
  9. Gerhard Richter – 40 Million USD
  10. David Hockney – 40 Million USD
  11. Cindy Sherman – 35 Million USD
  12. Richard Prince – 30 Million USD
  13. Andreas Gursky – 30 Million USD
  14. Chuck Close – 25 Million USD
  15. Georg Baselitz – 25 Million USD

For background on each one of the artists, check the full article over at Complex.

Via Highsnobiety

The Business of Fashion: Inside Supreme – Anatomy of a Global Streetwear Cult Part 2

Posted by Richard M on

 

Continuing from the first part released the other day here is the second article of Anatomy of a Global Streetwear Cult :

NEW YORK, United States — The mythology behind legendary New York streetwear brand Supreme is so potent, it’s easy to imagine founder James Jebbia as a king pin of downtown Manhattan. But as he will be the first to tell you, that couldn’t be farther from the truth.

In fact, Supreme’s core creative and business philosophies are the sum of Jebbia’s patchwork retail past; not, as one might assume, a storied legacy in skateboarding. His resume reads like a series of interconnected Google-map pins on a late-80s and early-90s SoHo New York. A British-transplant who arrived in New York around 1984, Jebbia got a job working at the now-defunct Parachute clothing store in SoHo.

“I didn’t know what I was doing, but I knew I enjoyed clothes,” he says. He quit five years later to open, along with his girlfriend at the time, a small flea market on Wooster Street inspired by the myriad of stuff he coveted from The Face and i-D magazines. The project evolved into his first proper store, Union, an experimental shop on Spring Street that carried “mostly English brands” and one very important streetwear juggernaut at the time by the name of Stüssy. This allowed Jebbia to work with Shawn Stüssy, who asked him to partner with him to open one of his eponymous boutiques on Prince Street in 1991.

When Stüssy left the business, Jebbia opened up Supreme in 1994 in a small storefront on Lafayette, a then-desolate street that was a perfect place for his clientele to skate first, shop second – an order that would very quickly be reversed. “I opened Supreme because there were no other decent skate shops around at the time,” Jebbia says. “I thought, cool, I might as well be the one to do it.”

The store was able to become the holy grail of high youth street culture by curating a mix of the city’s iconography – fashion, music, celebrity and politics – within its walls and then instantly sledge-hammering the city’s high-low playing field.

Limited-edition Damien Hirst skateboards are around the same price as decks featuring lyrics from Public Enemy; custom Spalding basketballs might be sold under the artist Nate Lowman’s gritty canvases hanging on the wall. The brand’s iconic T-shirts, like everything in the store, have become collector’s items that are collages of controversial provocations and heady imagery. Designs have included an oversized New York Times logo, a portrait of Kate Moss, lyrics from the reggae musician Lee “Scratch” Perry, Mickey Mouse’s hands praying with rosary beads, Budweiser labels, and alarmist political slogans such as “Illegal business controls America.”

 

You can read the rest of the article here.