Damien Hirst stands with his artwork The Golden Calf, which sold Monday in London for the equivalent of $19.7 million. Damien Hirst stands with his artwork The Golden Calf, which sold Monday in London for the equivalent of $19.7 million. (Prudence Cuming/Sotheby's)

Damien Hirst's plan to auction more than 200 of his new artworks got off to a bullish start in London on Monday with a record price for The Golden Calf.

Hirst's work, of a young bull in a tank of formaldehyde with golden hooves and its head crowned by a gold disc, sold for the equivalent of $19.7 million, a record for the artist.

The first day of the two-day sale through Sotheby's of London raised $135 million, only $50 million less than the total estimated for the two-day sale, which Hirst titled Beautiful Inside My Head Forever.

All 80 lots offered on the first day sold, with collectors and celebrities such as Bianca Jagger filling the room. Collectors and commercial dealers rapidly bid up prices.

The sale defied the meltdown in stock markets going on around the world after the failure of Lehman Brothers, the fourth-biggest U.S. investment bank, in New York.

"I think the market is bigger than anyone knows," Hirst said at the end of the first day. "I love art, and this proves I'm not alone and the future looks great for everyone."

The Golden Calf sold within the Sotheby's estimate of $18 million to $20 million, but surpassed Hirst's previous record at auction — the $18.4 million paid for his medicine cabinet Lullaby Spring.

His pickled tiger shark, titled The Kingdom, also was snapped up, for $18 million.

Other works that sold on Monday:

  • Afterlife,a butterfly painting, went for the equivalent of $2.6 million, almost double Sotheby's estimate.
  • Fragments of Paradise, a sculpture of stainless steel, glass and manufactured diamonds, sold for $10 million.
  • Heaven Can Wait, a triptych that combines Hirst's spin painting with butterflies, sold for $1.9 million, twice the upper estimate.
  • Two butterfly paintings were sold for charity for $3 million total.

"Banks fall over, art triumphs," former Royal Academy chief Norman Rosenthal told the Guardian newspaper on Monday.

The result was a triumph for Hirst, who achieved the elusive feat of selling his work directly to auction, bypassing the commercial galleries.

Ahead of the sale, Hirst said he was trying to set a new tradition in art sales by cutting out dealers, who take half the sale price. In comparison, the big auction houses normally charge vendors a commission in the ballpark of five per cent, but Sotheby's waived it for the two-dale Hirst sale.

"If you say to someone that galleries take 50 per cent, they'd be shocked by that. In any other business, it's an extortionate amount of money. I've never thought it made much sense," he said before the sale.

Hirst, 43, is the best known of the "Young British Artists" who emerged in the early 1990s.

The 223-lot sale concludes on Tuesday.