Damien Hirst at 60: a genius who never stops stretching our understanding of art and life – or a tired trickster ruined by his riches?

“I’m an artist, I have no idea about money.”

Damien Hirst is never far from scandal. Perhaps best known for immersing animal corpses into formaldehyde and selling them as art, the “enfant terrible” of the 1990s Young British Artists (YBA) movement seems to court controversy for a living – and has made an extraordinary amount of money in the process. Reputedly worth around £700 million, this working-class lad “easily” topped a recent list of the world’s richest artists.

Money is at the root of a lot of the questions that hover around Hirst’s legacy to the art world as he reaches his 60th birthday. Few artists have stress-tested the question of artistic value (and price) more than him – not least in his 2007 work For The Love of God: a platinum cast of a human skull encrusted with thousands of flawless diamonds.

It cost £14 million to produce and had an asking-price of £50 million. Praised by Guardian art critic Jonathan Jones as “the most honest work of art” in its shameless reflection of capitalist consumption, Observer columnist Nick Cohen accused it of not being ironic at all in its supposed critique of the art market – but rather, “rolling in it and loving it”. Hirst himself said of the skull piece: “It’s iconic and ironic. It has the two meanings.”

Last year, Hirst’s money-related motives were called into question again in an investigation by the Guardian which revealed he had backdated three formaldehyde sculptures to the 1990s when they were, in fact, made in 2017. The report also found he had backdated some of the 10,000 original spot paintings from his NFT project The Currency to 2016, despite them being made between 2018 and 2019.

Hirst’s company, Science Ltd, defended the artist by reminding critics that his art is conceptual – and that he has always been clear that what matters is “not the physical making of the object or the renewal of its parts, but rather the intention and the idea behind the artwork”. His lawyers pointed out:

The dating of artworks, and particularly conceptual artworks, is not controlled by any industry standard. Artists are perfectly entitled to be (and often are) inconsistent in their dating of works.

But some of the art world did not respond kindly to this approach. Writing about Hirst’s “backdating scandal”, New York’s Rehs Galleries asked not only if Hirst could be sued by buyers and investors, but whether he was in creative decline. And Jones accused Hirst of being stuck in the past, calling the Guardian’s findings a “betrayal” for the artist’s admirers which could “threaten to poison Hirst’s whole artistic biography”.

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Ever since Hirst burst on the art scene in the 1990s with his macabre readymades (or “objets trouvé”) of dead animals in vitrines, he has divided art critics and the public alike. He has faced – and denied – multiple allegations of plagiarism and been censored by animal rights activists, while also being acclaimed as a “genius” and one of the leading global artists of the 20th and 21st centuries. Amid all the eye-watering auction sales, he has donated artworks to numerous charities throughout his career.

So, was the backdating incident another instance of Hirst mastering the art of the concept – and even offering a sly critique of consumerism and the art world machine, of which he is such a large cog? Or was it really just a big lie by a multi-millionaire artist seeking even more financial gain?

As philosophers of art, we think our discipline can shed light on these complex questions by exploring the nature of conceptual art, aesthetic deception and the ethics of the art market. As we contemplate the legacy of Hirst at 60, we ask: must artists always be truthful?

What only the best art can attain

Hirst had a humble upbringing. Born in the English port city of Bristol in 1959, he was raised in Leeds by his Irish mother, who encouraged him to draw. He never met his father and got in trouble with the police on a few occasions in his youth. His early artistic education was rocky too: he got a grade E in art A-Level and was rejected a handful of times by art schools.

But as a teenager, he had fallen in love with Francis Bacon’s paintings, later explaining that he admired their visceral expressions of the horror of the fragile body, and that he “went into sculpture directly in reaction … to Bacon’s work”. Hirst would also use his work experience in a morgue to hone his anatomical drawing skills.

His love of conceptual art blossomed when he began studying fine art at London’s Goldsmiths University in 1986 – taught by art world legends such as Michael Craig-Martin and catching the attention of collector and businessman Charles Saatchi. Craig-Martin had risen to fame for his conceptual artwork An Oak tree (1973), consisting of a glass of water on a pristine shelf with a text asserting that the glass was, in fact, an oak tree. Hirst has described this artwork as “the greatest piece of conceptual sculpture – I still can’t get it out of my head”.

In 1990, the owner of the Saatchi gallery, Charles Saatchi, attended one of Hirst’s co-curated shows. He reportedly stood staring, mouth agape, at his piece consisting of a rotting cow head being engulfed by maggots, before buying it. It seems a rather apt beginning to their stormy relationship.

Hirst’s fascination with death culminated in his most notorious work of art, The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living (1991) – a dead tiger shark, caught off the coast of Queensland in Australia, preserved in formaldehyde in a glass vitrine.

We encountered the work, separately and ten years apart, in London and New York. We both felt inclined to dislike and dismiss it. Instead, we were simply overwhelmed. By forcing us to stare death in the face, literally, the work put everything on its edge – awe-inspiring and horrifying, life-affirming and fatal, in your face yet somehow apart and absent.

Like it or not, Hirst’s shark achieved what only the best art can: jolting us out of our everyday registers – making us confront mortality, the value of life, and the human condition.

Not everyone agreed, of course. After it was exhibited in the first YBA show at the Saatchi Gallery in 1992, there was a swarm of hate. According to the Stuckist Art Group (an anti-conceptual art movement), a dead shark isn’t art. Of Hirst’s entire oeuvre, the group’s co-founders have said: “They’re bright and they’re zany – but there’s fuck all there at the end of the day.”

After Hirst won the Turner Prize in 1995 for Mother and Child, Divided (a bisected cow and calf in glass tanks) Conservative politician Norman Tebbit asked whether the art world had “gone stark raving mad”. Art critic Brian Sewell exclaimed that Hirst’s work is “no more interesting than a stuffed pike over a pub door”.

But Hirst never seemed to care about such criticism as he tackled controversial themes ranging from death, science and religion to the unrelenting power of capitalism. Along the way, he has used his power to criticise the very art world of which he forms such an important part, and from which he has gained such enormous riches.

You might say his art reached a logical endpoint with The Currency in 2021 – a conceptual experiment in which 10,000 unique, hand-painted spot paintings were reduced to money itself, as they corresponded to 10,000 non-fungible tokens (NFTs). Buyers were given the choice of keeping either the physical or the digital version, while the other would be destroyed. Speaking to the actor and art enthusiast Stephen Fry, Hirst said of these paintings:

What if I made these and treated them like money? … I’ve never really understood money. All these things – art, money, commerce – they’re all ethereal. It relies not on notebooks or pieces of paper but belief, trust.

How Hirst makes his art

It’s not just what Hirst’s art supposedly means that sometimes rocks the boat, but how he makes it.

While he began his career by personally making and manipulating his chosen artistic materials – from paint and canvas to flies and maggots – he now unapologetically relies on a studio populated by numerous assistants to produce the works that bear his name. It is largely these studio workers who pour the paint on spinning canvases, handle the formaldehyde, construct the glass boxes, and source the dead animals.

Hirst has fully endorsed the conceptual artist’s mantra of “the art is the idea”. If the artwork is the idea rather than the material object, then it should suffice merely for the artist to think or conceptualise the objects for them to count as his works of art. According to this perspective, exactly who makes the objects which are exhibited, sold and debated in the media is entirely unimportant.

But to some, this adds to the ways in which they feel deceived or “had” by Hirst. After all, at least in the western artistic tradition, the connection between artist and artwork has for hundreds of years been considered unique, sacred even. If an artist doesn’t actually make the art any more, to what extent can they really be said to be an artist at all?

Except that, in this respect, Hirst is not particularly unusual. Outsourcing the physical act of making an artwork is almost standard among contemporary artists such as Anish Kapoor, Rachel Whiteread and Jeff Koons – all of whom have long relied on trainee artists, engineers, architects, constructors and more to build their large structural works.

And while Andy Warhol was the trendsetter in this regard from the early 1960s – calling his studio The Factory for its assembly line-style of production – the practice predates even him by hundreds of years. The great masters of the 16th, 17th and 18th centuries, having acquired sufficient fame and fortune, were rarely the sole creators of their masterpieces.

The 17th-century Flemish artist Rubens, for example, would often leave the painting of less central or prominent features in his works to his studio assistants – many of whom, including Anthony van Dyck and Jacob Jordaens, went on to highly successful artistic careers of their own. Even 14-year-old Leonardo da Vinci started out as a studio apprentice in the workshop of the Italian sculptor and painter Andrea del Verrocchio.

Unlike Rubens, however, Hirst now only rarely makes any kind of material contribution to his works, beyond adding his signature. The Currency series involved Hirst merely adding a watermark and signature to the thousands of handmade spot paintings.

Also, Hirst’s works make no formal recognition of this studio input, whereas for Rubens, the arrangement was fairly transparent. Indeed, the division of labour was sometimes even negotiated with the painting’s buyer – the more a buyer was willing to pay, the more Rubens would paint himself.

But Hirst makes no secret of his lack of physical involvement in the material process, explaining:

You have to look at it as if the artist is an architect – we don’t have a problem that great architects don’t actually build the houses … Every single spot painting contains my eye, my hand and my heart.

Hirst’s social media pages often show the artist arriving at his studio while his team are busy at work. And clearly, not all potential buyers care about his “hands-off approach” – a large part of what they value is, precisely, the signature. In 2020, Hirst told The Idler magazine’s editor Tom Hodgkinson:

If I couldn’t delegate, I wouldn’t make any work … If I want to paint a spot painting but don’t know how I want it to look, I can go to an assistant … When they ask how you want it to look, you can say: ‘I don’t know, just do it.’ It gives you something to kick against or work against.

In the past decade, though, Hirst says he has scaled back his studio, admitting his art life felt like it was out of control:

You start by thinking you’ll get one assistant and before you know it, you’ve got biographers, fire eaters, jugglers, fucking minstrels and lyre players all wandering around.

The product of a specific place and time

Hirst disrupts our beliefs about art to an extent matched by few of his contemporaries. Always in the business of fragmenting the already vague expectations of the art market – and wider general public – he continues the trajectory outlined by fellow experimental conceptual artists such as Marcel Duchamp, Joseph Beuys, Adrian Piper, Sol LeWitt, Joseph Kosuth and Yoko Ono – now well over 50 years ago.

When the making of art moves into this level of abstraction, a historical fact like the precise inception date seems harder to pin down – and it becomes much less clear which aspects of the creative process should determine when the work was “made”.

Of course, the same question arises outside the confines of this artistic genre. How should we deal with performative arts such as theatre, jazz or opera? Is it all that important to date John Coltrane’s Blue Train to its first recording in 1957, rather than any of the other dates on which the American jazz legend performed it? Surely some aesthetic and artistic qualities are added on each occasion?

However, art in general, be it Blue Train or one of Hirst’s spot paintings, is always the product of a specific place and time. It is undoubtedly a significant fact about Hirst’s Cain and Abel (1994) – one of the artworks highlighted by the Guardian misdating investigation – that it was “made” in the YBA boom of the 1990s.

Can we engage with these pieces without bringing knowledge of this fact into our experience of them? Yes. Can we grasp at least some of their wider meaning? Almost certainly. But can we fully appreciate them as cultural objects – defining a precise moment in the evolution of art and society at large, perhaps foreseeing a certain shift in our larger value systems including what art means to us? Maybe not.

Hirst may well believe he is following a robust and historical line of artistic reasoning, and therefore telling the truth as he sees it. This is certainly the line his lawyers took in their public statement in response to the backdating allegations.

But there is another possibility we need to consider – one that touches on the worries of some of Hirst’s critics. What if Hirst intentionally misled the public for financial and commercial gain, and that the dating debacle has nothing to do with his cunning conceptual practice?

Jon Sharples, senior associate at London-based law firm Howard Kennedy – one of the first UK practices to advise on art and cultural property law – observed a few reasons why an artist might deliberately fudge or mislead on the origin of their art:

The potential for commercial pressure to do so is obvious. If works from a certain period achieve higher market prices than works from other periods, there is a clear incentive to increase the supply of such works to meet the demand for them.

Another reason Sharples offered is an art-historical one – to make the artist appear more radical: “In the linear, western conception of art history – in which ‘originality’ is often elevated above all other artistic virtues, and great store is placed in being the ‘first’ artist to arrive at a particular development – artists have sometimes been given to tampering with the historical record.”

Here, Sharples referenced the famous example of “the father of abstraction”, Russian artist Kazimir Malevich, backdating the first version of his Black Square by two years.

So, has Hirst just told a big fib about the origins of some of his art?

Philosophers largely agree that lying involves asserting something you believe to be untrue; speaking seriously but not telling the truth. And most of the time, we all assume that people around us abide by the norm that everyone ought to speak truthfully to each other. If we didn’t believe this, we would barely be able to communicate with one another. Lying involves violating this “truth norm”.

Yet, the case of art seems to stand in stark contrast to this. When we ask whether an artist has lied as part of their artistic practice, it is often not clear that there is a straightforward truth norm in the art world to be violated: it’s not clear that the artist is speaking ‘seriously’ in the first place.

I (Daisy) have researched in depth the reasons why lying in the art world is such a tricky business. In many exhibitions, it is the aesthetic experience that is of primary value. If what matters is creating beauty, then straightforward truth is not the point.

Moreover, even in cases where the art is designed to convey a specific message, it’s tricky to say in what sense they ought to tell “the truth”. Many artworks represent fictional scenarios which needn’t be fully accurate.

For instance, it was quite acceptable in the 16th century for painters of religious paintings to give central biblical figures inaccurate clothing – and for portrait artists not to paint their sitter’s flaws and blemishes. And in the perplexing art world of the 21st century, many post-1960 artforms are designed to challenge and critique the very nature of truth itself.

All of which means straightforward “truth games” do not operate as smoothly in the art world as they do in the ordinary world. With its self-reflective and self-critical structure, the art world of today offers a space to think open-endedly and creatively. Do you expect everything you see in an art gallery, or even speeches by conceptual artists, to be straightforwardly “true”? We don’t think so.

The art world is hardly renowned for its straightforwardly communicated messages. To accuse Hirst of lying assumes he is playing the truth game that the rest of us are signed up to in the first place. And it’s not clear he is.

Hirst might be closer to a novelist or actor who plays with and explores the very nature of truth and falsehood. In this way, he’s maybe at most a “bullshitter” who doesn’t play – or care for – the truth game at all.

The real problem?

But this fascination with Hirst’s dating practices may overlook the more important – if equally complex – problem of how his art works were made, rather than when. Are the ethical concerns about the production of Hirst’s enormous oeuvre the real issue in assessing his legacy as an artist?

For instance, Hirst has been criticised for treating his staff as “disposable”. During the peak of the COVID pandemic, he laid off 63 of his studio assistants even though his company had reportedly received £15 million of emergency loans from the UK government.

And while Hirst’s lawyers insist his studios always adhere to health-and-safety regulations, some of the “factory line” workers producing artworks for The Currency were allegedly left with repetitive strain injuries. One artist described their year-long toil as “very, very tedious”. Another commented on the work tables being at a low level, forcing them to constantly bend down.

Hirst has publicly praised assistants such as the artist Rachel Howard, who he described as “the best person who ever painted spots for me”. Likewise, Howard described working with Hirst as “a very good symbiotic” relationship.

Another area of enduring controversy is Hirst’s use of animals. In 2017, Artnet magazine estimated that nearly 1 million animals had been killed for his artworks over the years, including 36 farm animals, 685 sea creatures, and 912,005 birds and insects. The same year, Italian animal rights group 100% Animalisti summarised the concerns about animal ethics in Hirst’s art:

Hirst is famous for exhibiting slain animals … and for the use of thousands of butterflies whose wings are torn and glued on various objects. Death and the taste of the macabre serve to attract attention. Then wealthy collectors such as Saatchi and even the prestigious Sotheby’s artificially inflate the prices of Hirst’s junk. It’s a squalid commercial operation based on death and contempt for living and sentient beings.

Indeed, some of Hirst’s macabre formaldehyde pieces are known for rotting a little too much. The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living originally deteriorated due to an improper preservation technique, and had to be replaced by another shark caught off the same Australian coast. It’s not clear how many sharks have now been killed – or will need to be killed in the future – to preserve this masterpiece.

Further concerns have been raised about the environmental ethics of Hirst’s art, including that The Currency project incurred a hefty carbon footprint because of its reliance on blockchain technology. While Hirst used a more environmentally-friendly sidechain to release his NFTs, he still received payment via bitcoin, which has a far higher energy consumption.

All of this raises wider questions about the art world’s role, for both good and bad, in modern life – from the treatment of workers in the gig economy to the climate emergency, biodiversity and animal rights.

Traditionally, art historians, critics and investors have championed an artwork’s meaning over any of its moral flaws in its production. But the ethics of artmaking are now being questioned by philosophers such as ourselves, as well as by many influential figures in the art world. Artworks that incur large carbon footprints, cause damage to ecosystems, or use and kill animals, are now considered morally flawed in these ways.

Philosophers such as Ted Nannicelli argue that these ethical defects can actually diminish the artistic value of the work of art. Meanwhile, artists such as Angela Singer and Ben Rubin and Jen Thorp use their art for animal and eco-activism, while doing no harm to creatures or the ecosystem in the process.

As we both acknowledge, Hirst’s shark expressed a laudable meaning in an arresting way. But is this enough to excuse the (repeated) killing of this awesome animal? Do we become complicit in its death by praising it as art? It is a question anybody who was impressed by its sheer aesthetic presence all those years ago should ask themselves.

In this and many other ways, Hirst’s work continues to raise fundamental questions about art – long after it was created, or dated. If nothing else, surely this confirms his enduring position in the British art establishment.

Damien Hirst’s representatives were contacted about the criticisms of Hirst that are highlighted in this article, but they did not respond by the time of publication.

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Elisabeth Schellekens has received funding from Vetenskapsrådet (Swedish Funding Council) as Principal Investigator for research into Aesthetic Perception and Aesthetic Cognition (2019-22), and an AHRC Innovation Award on Perception and Conceptual Art with Peter Goldie (2003).

Daisy Dixon does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.