According to The Guardian, at least 1,000 paintings that artist Damien Hirst said were “created in 2016” were created several years later.
Hirst created 10,000 paintings, each consisting of colorful hand-drawn dots on A4 paper, as part of a project called Currency, which was born out of a desire to create a form of currency from art. idea.
The year 2016 is engraved next to the artist’s signature on the work. Hirst and the authorized sellers of the paintings have repeatedly stated that the physical works were created in 2016.
When they go on sale in 2021, in a high-profile event, buyers will have the option to acquire a permanent digital record of the paintings in the form of a non-fungible token (NFT), which Hirst said is “the most The most exciting projects I have worked on so far.”
The first sale brought in approximately $18 million. At the time, Hirst said of the project: “It consists of 10,000 NFTs, each corresponding to a unique physical piece of art produced in 2016.”
The paintings were sold through Heni, a single authorized seller run by Hirst’s business managers. At the time, it was said that the works were “hand-created in 2016.”
However, five sources familiar with the creation of the works, including some of the painters who painted the dots on paper, told the Guardian that many of the works were mass-produced in 2018 and 2019.
Their accounts show that at least 1,000 (and possibly thousands) of the Money paintings were produced over a two-year period. The paintings were produced in two studios in Gloucestershire and London by dozens of painters hired by Hirst’s company Science Ltd, which one source described as a “Henry Ford production line”.
The reverse of each painting is marked with microdots, an embossed seal of authenticity, and a title, date, and signature in pencil. It is generally accepted that the dates of artworks refer to the year they were completed.
When contacted for comment, attorneys for Hearst and Science did not deny the artist’s assertion that at least 1,000 of the 2016 paintings were painted several years later. They did not answer the question of why Hirst explicitly stated that the physical artworks were “produced in 2016.”
However, they denied that Hirst was intentionally misleading, arguing that it was his “customary practice” to label physical works in conceptual art projects with the date the project was conceived, which in the case of Money was 2016 .
Hirst and Science used a similar argument in March after The Guardian revealed that several of his company’s famous formaldehyde sculptures of pickled animals dated to the 1990s, even though they were made in Produced in 2017.
At the time, Hirst’s lawyers said he sometimes used different methods when dating works, adding: “An artist has every right (and often does) to be inconsistent in the dating of his works.”
Some formaldehyde paintings dating to the 1990s have been exhibited in galleries in Hong Kong, New York, Munich, London and Oxford. One of them, a 4-meter (13-foot) tiger shark, was sold to a Las Vegas billionaire for about $8 million.
In contrast, the “Currency” painting will be aimed at the mass market when it goes on sale in 2021.
“What if I made these and saw them as money?”
According to sources familiar with the production of the “Currency” series, dozens of artists were hired to assist in factory-style production of the series in 2018 and 2019. Virus. smoke.
Their workstations were long tables spread across Hirst’s studio, with dozens of pages laid out on them. Each sheet is decorated with holograms, Hearst watermarks and particles. The artists carefully move around each painting, adding a dot of color to each page in turn.
“It was very, very boring,” one artist recalled. Another person said: “There are a lot of sheets on these tables and they are low so you have to keep bending over to do the work. Some people develop repetitive strain injuries after a while.
Lawyers for Hearst and Scientific said they always comply with relevant health and safety rules and practices.
Sources say that at the workshop, paintings were made throughout the week and left to dry over the weekend. Special drying racks were purchased to speed up the process. Footage seen by the Guardian, apparently shot in 2019 or later, shows hundreds of artworks placed on tables, dotted by artists and then carefully stacked on drying racks.
When asked how many of the 10,000 paintings were created after 2016, Hirst and Science did not respond.
The five sources witnessed the creation process at different times in 2018 and 2019, and it is difficult to give an exact figure for the total number of paintings created during that period. However, their accounts indicate that more than 1,000 were produced at the time – the actual number may have been several times greater.
Exactly why Hirst needed more paintings is unclear. One reasonable explanation is that he needed to create 10,000 individual works to sustain sales involving NFTs, which at the time were viewed as a potentially lucrative novelty in the art market.
Hirst conceived the “Currency” painting in 2016, which is reminiscent of his larger dot paintings. “When I look at them, I think they’re a little unique, but they all look the same; they’re handmade, so they look like prints, but they’re not prints,” he said. “Then I thought, ‘What if I made these and used it as money?'”
Joe Hage, Hearst’s longtime agent and founder of the Heni sales platform, told Bloomberg that Hearst was not aware of NFTs until two years later in 2018. “So he started planning an NFT project,” Hager said.
NFTs, which allow artists to sell digital artwork using blockchain technology, could disrupt the art market at the time. Last year, CryptoPunks launched, linking computer-generated images of cartoon character avatars to blockchain-backed tokens for sale to buyers. The collection includes 10,000 different NFTs that trade at high prices.
Andrea Baronchelli, a professor in charge of cryptocurrencies and NFTs at the Alan Turing Institute in London, said that after CryptoPunks, issuing 10,000 pieces of art became a standard for other future art projects to follow. Jon Sharples, an art and intellectual property lawyer at Howard Kennedy, also believed that 10,000 was “the magic number for NFT art projects” at the time.
In a 2021 presentation, Hirst seemed to indicate that 10,000 paintings was, for some reason, the optimal number for the project. After making a few hundred dollars, he said, he realized he needed more. “I thought what if I make more than 500, what if I make 1,000 or 5,000? So I made 5,000, and then we looked at it and realized 5,000 wasn’t enough, we had to make 10,000 , so that there are enough funds to move this way.
When all works go on sale in July 2021, the only seller will be Heni. It also repeatedly mentioned that the physical creation of all paintings was in 2016. “Each artwork has the artist’s number, title, seal and signature on the reverse.”
When contacted for comment on these comments, Heni’s attorney stated: “All artistic decisions are made by the artist. Our client follows his methods and logic.” Heni’s law firm, Joseph Hage Aaronson, also Representing Hearst and Science. Hager is a partner in the firm.
In response to questions on behalf of Hearst and Science magazine, his lawyers rejected any suggestion that the artist’s dating practices were commercially driven. They said Hirst believed it was “correct” that physical artworks in concept projects should bear the year of conception, “which is not necessarily the date of physical production of any particular object in the project”.
However, this was not the approach Hirst took on two of the 10,000 paintings, images of which can be found online. When the Guardian examined all 10,000 images, it found that while 9,998 were dated to 2016, there were, curiously, two exceptions: a painting called 4778. year; the other is titled 1321.
Hirst’s lawyers said the two paintings were an anomaly and “were incorrectly dated following subsequent changes in the title and title of the works”.
Hirst painting burned in ceremony
By July 2021, Hirst had accumulated enough A4 paintings to sustain what would become one of the most talked about art events of the year.
The artist, whose works can sell for millions of dollars, is considered the preserve of the global financial elite. The currency sale gives ordinary art lovers a chance to acquire an authentic Hirst painting—or its NFT equivalent.
But buyers can’t have it both ways. Unusually, if the buyer chooses a digital version in the form of an NFT, the physical painting will be destroyed.
In total, buyers chose to keep physical versions of 5,149 paintings. Hirst retained 1,000 pieces, although he chose to keep them as NFT versions. The same goes for buyers of nearly 4,000 A4 paintings, who chose blockchain-based tokens because they knew their physical incarnations would be burned.
So in October 2022, in one of the annual art events, Hirst and his team burned almost half of the Money paintings at his Newport Street gallery in London.
Surrounded by cameras, he ritually destroyed some of his works. He held up the paintings to the camera, announced their titles, and tossed them into a glass wood-burning stove. “I actually like it more than I thought I would,” he joked to his assistant.
It was a dramatic moment that sparked more debate about the Turner Prize-winning artist and the questions he raised about the nature of art. However, at its core, the monetary project reaffirms the authenticity of art. Its premise is that unique works—whether in physical form or blockchain tokens—are as immutable as money itself.
As Mark Carney, the former governor of the Bank of England, said in a video promoting Hirst’s project: “Ultimately, money is built on trust… and is at the heart of this project. [art project] It’s also a sense of trust—trust in the underlying art.
Thousands of buyers of Currency may now question whether they can trust the 2016 date engraved on the back of Hirst’s A4 color painting, which the artist says is part of a collection “created in 2016.”
