Another fraud by the artist Damien Hirst

Thousands of the artist's works dating back to 2016 were actually mass-produced years later, according to a new report. Damien Hirst, who appeared on the UK art scene in the 90s, has been painted as a bad guy in the art world. From laying off 63 members of his studio team at the height of the pandemic, while his companies claimed £15 million in government loans (Damien Hirts is one of the richest artists in the world), to taking his fans into the nebulous world of NFTs, this man has never been the art's most ethical soldier, but now he has allegedly been exposed as a true fraudster as well.

As reported by the Guardian, Hirst created at least 1,000 paintings dated 2016 several years later, despite inscribing the year on the works alongside his own signature. The works in question? A bunch of colorful dots on A4 paper, which the artist introduced as a series called The Currency in 2021 (one where fans had the option of buying the physical painting for £2,000, or burning it and receiving an NFT instead) .

At the time of the sale, which netted Hirst around $18 million, he said of the project: “It consists of 10,000 NFTs, each corresponding to a unique physical work made in 2016.” The seller of the works, Heni (which is managed by Hirst's business manager) also specified that the paintings were “created by hand in 2016 using enamel paint on handmade paper.”
However, in the Guardian report, five sources close to the work – including painters of the extortionate spots – disputed these claims, saying many of them were mass-produced as early as 2019. According to their accounts of “Henry Ford's production line ” which saw dozens of painters commissioned by Hirst's Science Ltd, at least 1,000 were made over a two-year period from 2018 to 2019, and perhaps as many as several thousand.

Hirst and Science declined to reveal exactly how many of the works in The Currency were made after 2016 when contacted by the newspaper for comment, but they did not deny that at least 1,000 of them were made on a different date than they were labeled. According to the artist's lawyers, this does not count as misleading collectors, because it is Hirst's “usual practice” to label physical works with the date the project was conceived, rather than when they were actually made.
This also explains why several of Hirst's famous formaldehyde sculptures, created in 2017, were previously dated to the 1990s and displayed as such in galleries around the world. “Artists are perfectly entitled to be (and often are) inconsistent in dating works,” their lawyers argued when confronted about these preserved and confused corpses in March 2024.

The Guardian report also details the painting process, which was – as one artist recalls – “very, very tedious”. “Factory-style” production saw many painters work eight hours a day wearing gas masks (to protect themselves from the fumes) to paint hundreds of pages marked with Hirst's head and a stamp of authenticity, arranged on long tables. “There were a lot of leaves on these tables, and they were quite low, so you had to constantly bend over to make the stitches,” says another artist. “After a while, some people were getting repetitive strain injuries.” Lawyers for Hirst and Science responded that they have always adhered to relevant health and safety rules and practices.

Is it any surprise that Hirst doesn't seem well-liked among his workers? Not really. Is it shocking that he misled collectors about some dates, when he is also the man who burned down half of his fans' works and sold essentially nothing to them? Neither.