According to an investigation by Guardian at least a thousand works by the famous and controversial English artist Damien Hirst sold in 2021 as part of the controversial “The Currency” project would not have been painted in 2016, as stated, but only at a later time and with the help of other people. That project was a grand experiment involving ten thousand similar, but not identical, works that could be purchased physically or as NFTs, the digital certificates of authenticity used to guarantee ownership of something.
In short, thousands of buyers could have bought an “original” work by Hirst from a collection “made in 2016”, but produced years later and en masse: an accusation supported by five sources close to the artist heard by the Guardian, and which could lead to possible trouble for the reputation of the artist, one of the best known and most quoted in the world, also famous for his crafty, provocative and ambiguous approach towards the art market. Only in March, always on Guardian had revealed in an investigation that some of Hirst’s sculptures, part of a popular series of animals preserved in formaldehyde, had been dated to the 1990s even though they dated back to 2017.
The 10 thousand works of “The Currency” (“the currency”) are created on 20×30 centimeter sheets and have a single common theme: polka dots, which the 58-year-old artist has been using in various forms for more than thirty years. Even though they follow a series of simple rules on shapes and colours, they are all different: the authenticity of each one is certified by a holographic image of Hirst, his signature, a title written in pencil, a serial number and a microdot, i.e. a text or image greatly reduced so that it can only be identified by those who know of its existence.
The project aimed to explore the value of art and its commercial sustainability, in a period in which NFTs had become fashionable, and at the same time the awareness was spreading that they could sometimes be worth even more than one physical work. It envisaged that 10 thousand NFTs relating to the same number of works would be sold for two thousand dollars each to those who registered on a special site. Each owner could then decide whether to keep the NFT or have the physical work to which that NFT was associated: in the first case the relevant work would be destroyed.
Hirst had said on several occasions that he created the works in the series in 2016, when he did not yet know what NFTs were, and as Heni, their authorized reseller, also claimed. The same year is indicated on the back of the plates.
Five people involved in their creation however told the Guardian that many plates of “The Currency” were produced between 2018 and 2019 with the help of dozens of artists hired by Hirst’s company, Science Ltd, and created in two studios, one in London and one in Gloucestershire, south of Birmingham. According to their reconstructions, at least a thousand works in the series were made in that period, but there could be many more. Of the videos seen by Guardian which appear to date from 2019 or later show hundreds of boards placed on long tables while artists painted polka dots on them, then set them aside to dry.
The lawyers of Hirst and his company, contacted by Guardian, they did not clarify why the works would have been created after 2016, but they did not deny it either. They argued that in a conceptual art project like this it is a “widespread practice” to indicate the date in which it was conceived, in this case 2016, and they also denied that Hirst had spoken about it in misleading terms. According to the lawyers, in short, the date of a work “does not necessarily correspond to the date on which a certain object of the project was physically made”.
To date, therefore, it is not clear why Hirst would have dated his works to 2016, but one of the hypotheses made by Guardian it’s that he wanted to do many more than he had initially planned – a few hundred – for the project to be economically sustainable. Only two out of ten thousand are actually dated 2018 and 2021: for lawyers it is an error linked to subsequent changes to their title.
The back of one of the works from the series, dated 2016 (Heni)
Hirst’s lawyers had provided similar explanations already in March, when always the Guardian had revealed that some of his famous sculptures dating back to the 1990s and exhibited in various museums in New York, Hong Kong, Munich and London had actually been made in 2017. They were part of the series of animals preserved in formaldehyde, which had obtained a vast success. According to the lawyers, Hirst sometimes uses different methods to date his works and, like all artists, he has “full right” to do so inconsistently.
Hirst is one of the world’s most popular, controversial and wealthy artists, known for his provocative approach to art and its conventions, and has often exploited ambiguity and falsification as a means of expression. One of his 2017 exhibitions held in Venice, for example, was called Treasures from the Wreck of the Unbelievable and exhibited various artefacts of his creation presented as finds found in the wreck of a presumed ancient Greek ship. To accompany the exhibition, a fake press campaign was organized which documented the recovery operations from the wreck, which in reality had never existed (the falsification was however evident, and therefore not misleading).
Hirst is a very prolific artist and for this reason his works have saturated the market, causing their value to drop significantly by the standards of the art world. To get an idea, you can consider two very similar works: Lullaby Spring was sold in 2007 for $19.2 million, while Lullaby Winter it was sold in 2015 for $4.6 million. The works of “The Currency”, however, were aimed at a wider audience, as part of a stunt that linked contemporary art to the cryptocurrency sector.
After a year from the purchase, and after the crisis of both cryptocurrencies and NFTs, 5,149 owners of the ten thousand works had decided to ask for the physical works, while the remaining 4,851 had kept the NFTs, which they were however free to resell. Hirst himself, who had kept a thousand plates for himself, had chosen the NFTs, according to him after much indecision: all the works associated with these digital certificates were then burned in October 2022 during an event in his gallery in Newport Street in London.
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