NEW YORK (Reuters) - The artist best known for pickling a shark and slicing up a cow admits he's had some pretty silly ideas over the years.
But Damien Hirst, the aging enfant terrible of the British art world, is optimistic that museums will still be showing at least some of his work in 200 years' time.
"You do turn round after a few years and look at your stuff and you think it's embarrassing," Hirst said in an interview at New York's Gagosian gallery, where his latest work is on show in an exhibition called "The Elusive Truth."
"Certainly everything you make is not a masterpiece."
So what would he consider a mistake? "Some of my spin paintings I think are a bit silly," Hirst said, referring to a series of paintings made by dropping paint onto a canvas on a spinning table.
"The cut in half pig that moves like a bacon slicer I suppose I thought was a bit silly in retrospect," he added. "I think you want people to rub their chins instead of belly laugh if you want to get it in the museums in 200 years' time."
Not all his bad ideas have come to fruition. "I was toying with the idea of putting vibrators all over a pig and I was going to call it pork you pine," he said. "I didn't do it."
But he stands by his most famous work, a shark preserved in formaldehyde and titled "The Physical Impossibility of Death In The Mind Of Someone Living." The 1991 work was recently sold by collector Charles Saatchi to an American buyer for $13 million (7 million pounds).
"I think the shark's obviously an important piece," he said, brushing off reports that it is disintegrating. "I think it just needs a bit of love and attention," he said.
ARTIST OR CONMAN?
The new exhibition -- 29 photorealist oil paintings based on photographs of hospital scenes, drug addicts, suicide bombers and his own artwork -- has been fuel for the fire for those who question whether he is an artist or a conman.
The paintings, which have sold for $200,000 to $2 million each, were largely executed by assistants with Hirst stepping in only to add a touch of blood or do the eyes.
"I don't like the idea that it has to be done by the artist, I think it's quite an old fashioned thing," he said.
"Architects don't build their own houses," he said, adding that his assistants are better painters than him anyway. "You'd get an inferior painting if it's done by the artist."
He said he had thought of creating an office chair carved in marble but would never do that himself. "I'd have to go off and train for two years to be a marble carver and then I'd carve one chair and then I'd probably go back to painting."
He admits it's also a matter of impatience. "I want to do 1,000 paintings immediately and I can't do that on my own," he said, before returning to a back room at the Gagosian to sign prints of work in the show which sell for around $20,000.
Now aged 39 and a father of two, Hirst said he was getting a bit old for the label "enfant terrible," but he didn't take it too seriously. "Whatever you do they'll find a way to make a joke out of it," he said.
"People come up to me sometimes and say 'You're in a position where you could put a dog poo onto a lobster and call it art.' But why would I? Why would somebody do something stupid like that," he said.
Hype and controversy can only take an artist so far, he said. "You can buy drinks for all the collectors in the world and get your stuff in the (museums), but in 200 years' time if it's crap, it's not going to be there, is it?"
So does he think his work will be there in 200 years? "Some of it might be. You just have to keep working on it."
