Damien Hirst Backdated 1,000 Paintings

Damien Hirst backdated at least 1,000 enamel-on-paper paintings for a 2021 NFT project,The Guardianreports. Hirst, who earlier this year was found to havebackdatedseveral of the formaldehyde works for which he is famed, sold the aforementioned paintings under assurances that they dated to 2016, when in fact they were mass-produced by staffers in 2018 and 2019.

The works in question fall under the rubric of the so-called spot paintings that Hirst began making in the mid-1980s. Ten thousand of the busy, vibrating canvases were painted as part of a series called “The Currency,” which Hirst offered for sale through Heni, a dealer run by his business manager. Available as either NFTs or as paintings on paper, the works were priced at $2,000 apiece in an effort to appeal to less-affluent collectors. Those who chose the NFT option were assured that its physical counterpart would be incinerated.

Each work was said to have been “created by hand in 2016.” However, a Guardian investigation informed by sources including artists who had made some of the works revealed that the paintings were created in 2018 and 2019 at two studios belonging to Hirst’s company Science Ltd. by dozens of painters working in what one source characterized as a “Henry Ford production line.”

“[The works] are handmade so they look like a print but they are not a print,” Hirst told The Guardian at the time of their conception. “And then I thought, ‘What if I made these and then treated it like money?’” Hirst sold more than 5,000 of the physical works, kept 1,000 NFT iterations for himself, and sold the rest as NFTs, burning the physical works in a filmed event in the fall of 2022. Each of the remaining physical works bears a microdot, an embossed stamp of authenticity and, in pencil, a title, date, and signature; these are accordingly visible in the NFT versions. All but two—dated respectively to 2018 and 2021—bear the 2016 date.

Attorneys for Hirst and Science Ltd. did not deny the discrepancy between the works’ dating and the actual years of their creation but argued that the artist had not been deliberately misleading, saying it was Hirst’s “usual practice” to date conceptual works according to the year they were conceived rather than the year they were produced.