Art2Vu

The best chance of identifying the next Damien Hirst is to establish relationships with galleries and dealers who have successfully nurtured and promoted emerging artists, as well as visiting contemporary art fairs and museums.

Sourcing artists responsible for pioneering new trends can be extremely rewarding financially. For example those who identified Chinese contemporary as a new trend where rewarded for their prescience.

Purchasing pieces from such artists needs to be done selectively - distinctive of that artist's characteristic style and a quality piece of work. It is a big mistake to buy poor quality doodles from big names. The productivity, trend leadership and promotion of that artist is also very important.

The controversial contemporary artist Damien Hirst had a comparatively brief stage as an emerging artist in the early 1990s. This phase normally requires many years of attending to ones subject matter and networking within the art world - due to the natural processes of self-discovery and the sheer magnitude of new talent entering the market.

At this time there was a somewhat staid UK contemporary art scene, ripe for the 'Black Swan' type random event or force majeure of society that was to drive this Young British Artist (YBA) movement and its creators. 

The synergistic combination of Saatchi's transfer from advertising mogul to art dealer and the culmination of Hirsts' collaborative energy directed into organising Freeze, as a second year student at Goldsmiths, was a predominant catalyst for his meteoric rise.