Artist Damien Hirst is embroiled in allegations of claiming many of his works to be much older than they actually are.
On Tuesday, The Guardian ran an expose on the artist, revealing that more than a thousand of his paintings were made later than claimed. The paintings were part of the series ‘The Currency’ – a major series by Damien Hirst consisting of thousands of works. The concerned paintings, numbered at least 1100, were all dot paintings made on A4 paper sheets. According to the report, the paintings – claimed by Hirst to be made in 2016 – were actually mass-produced between 2018 and 2019.
The report stands in tune with earlier investigative reports by The Guardian published in March, which revealed that a sculpture of a shark in a formaldehyde-filled tank, initially claimed to be created in 1999, was actually made in 2017. A representative for Damien Hirst didn’t deny the allegations of erroneous dates but claimed that the artist has a habit of dating works to the date when the idea was first conceived.
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Intentional backdating is an issue because for blue-chip artists like Hirst, older works are much more valuable than newer ones. His ‘The Currency’ series was also at the center of another controversial decision in 2021. Damien Hirst had announced selling 10,000 works from the series as NFTs, at a time when NFTs were at an all-time height of popularity. He also added an interesting option – buyers could choose to keep either the physical copy or the NFT; if chosen the latter, the former would be destroyed. While popular at the beginning, the series soon fell off along with the craze of NFTs in the art world.
