Damien Hirst, who rose to fame in the ’90s as the enfant terrible of the Young British Artists, is best known for shocking audiences with his art—from dead animals suspended in formaldehyde to floating basketballs to collections of pills—and the high price tags that have now come to accompany his works.
Hirst’s first came to prominence with his inclusion in the controversial 1988 exhibition “Freeze” that brought together several YBA artists; the show was staged while Hirst was still a student at London’s Goldsmiths College. Utilizing low-brow found objects with an entrepreneurial spirit, the YBAs exemplified a shift in what could be considered art, one that was accompanied by considerable criticism and outrage as to their art’s merit.
Hirst’s own work often centers on issues like death and systems of belief and value, in particular, focusing on the power of the art market. In September 2008, on the brink of the Great Recession, Hirst notoriously sold a body of new work at Sotheby’s, bringing in £70.5 million (around $127 million at the time) and skipping the art world’s gallery system, which would typically handle the first sales of new work. Some have argued that this ended his run “as an art-market darling,” but presently Hirst is represented by major galleries like Gagosian and White Cube. Add to this Hirst’s reputation as the U.K’s richest artist, who has amassed a serious collection of contemporary art that landed him on ARTnews’s Top 200 Collectors list each year between 2008 and 2014.
In the years since, controversy has continued to follow Hirst, from designing the penthouse suite at the Palms Casino Resort in Las Vegas in 2019 filled with his greatest hits to recent reports that his infamous diamond skull allegedly didn’t actually sell in 2007 for $100 million. His history of following the money has recently extended into his first foray into NFTs last summer. “The Currency,” a digital collection that riffs on his series of “spot” paintings, which are visually similar to the NFTs, gave buyers the option to decide between a physical painting or an NFT. In an added flair of drama, the piece not chosen would subsequently be burned.
But he is not only focused on the NFT market: his recent real-life exhibition, “Forgiving and Forgetting” at Gagosian’s 24th Street location was his first show in New York in four years. That show opened in January and was later extended until April 16. Through it all, Hirst has succeeded in keeping his name at the top of our minds.
Below, a guide to five of Hirst’s most controversial works to date.
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The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living, 1991
Image Credit: AP Photo/KEYSTONE/Regina Kuehne One of Hirst’s best-known works, The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living first showed at Saatchi Gallery in 1992, the first time Hirst was nominated for the Turner Prize. (He lost that year to sculptor Grenville Davey, who died earlier this year.) Similar to a later work, 1995’s Mother and Child of cow and her calf, which ended up winning him that year’s Turner Prize, The Physical Impossibility of Death shows an Australian tiger shark floating in a tank, preserved in a serene blue liquid (formaldehyde), motionless yet posed with his teeth barred. Controversy soon ensued, but for somewhat unexpected reasons. The Stuckist International Gallery in London protested Hirst’s piece, saying that he had copied Eddie Saunder’s shark made three years before.
In a 2004 speech at the Royal Academy, late critic Robert Hughes notably denounced the piece as both unradical and an example of the commercialized art world’s “cultural obscenity.” From 2007 to 2010, the work was on view at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, courtesy of top collector Steven A. Cohen. More recently, works of this kind made headlines in 2016 when a scientific paper alleged that some of Hirst’s formaldehyde-suspended animals were leaking toxic fumes; the paper’s findings were later retracted under questionable grounds.
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Pharmacy, 1992
Image Credit: Stefan Rousseau/Press Association via AP Images Pharmacy is a full-room installation that includes rows of medical cabinets containing packaged drugs behind glass sheets. At the counter are four bottles that symbolize earth, air, fire, and water, representing ancient and non-Western medicine. A glowing insect-o-cutor hangs above four stools holding four bowls of honeycomb. This aestheticized representation of a pharmacy, when exhibited in a museum or gallery space, raises questions about medicine as a system of belief, and the ways in which the notion of a “cure” is seductive. If we go for the honeycomb, will we be electrocuted?
As with other works, Pharmacy has been accused of being almost too similar to Joseph Cornell’s Pharmacy, from 1943, which also displays bottles within a cabinet. While Hirst’s Pharmacy was on view at Tate Modern, he launched an accompanying restaurant that included his own pill-related decor and works. The Royal Pharmaceutical Society of Great Britain (RPSGB) sued Hirst and other owners because the naming of the restaurant as “Pharmacy” was potentially misleading the public into thinking it was indeed a pharmacy. The charges were dropped once the restaurant was renamed to “Pharmacy Restaurant and Bar.” The restaurant closed in 2003 after financial and managerial troubles.
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For the Love of God, 2007
Said to be one of the most expensive pieces of contemporary art ever made, For the Love of God is a platinum cast of a skull from an unidentified 18th-century European that is encrusted with 8,601 diamonds. At the front of the skull cast sits a 52.4 carat pink diamond. Styled as a memento mori, the art historical trope that alludes to the brevity of life, Hirst has said, “I remember thinking it would be great to do a diamond one — but just prohibitively expensive… then I started to think — maybe that’s why it is a good thing to do. Death is such a heavy subject, it would be good to make something that laughed in the face of it.” The inevitability of death is juxtaposed with an excessive amount of diamonds. The work raises questions about art as a commodity; the actual material is costly and the buyer receives not only the current value of the artwork, and not necessarily the total value of the individual diamonds used.
As with previous works, Hirst faced accusations of copying another artist. John LeKay claimed Hirst had likewise stolen his idea for the skull, citing the jewel-covered skulls he had been producing since 1993. Hirst and LeKay had worked together in the past, and Hirst has even said, “All my ideas are stolen, anyway.” Critics saw the work as tasteless or even simply a decorative object, made for the blue-chip tastes of the market. In 2007, the work reportedly sold for $100 million to an unnamed investment group, but this past January, Hirst admitted that the skull, in fact, never sold, and is still owned by Hirst and White Cube gallery.
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Treasures from the Wreck of the Unbelievable, 2017
Image Credit: Sabine Glaubitz/picture-alliance/dpa/AP Images Every two years, all eyes are on Venice, as the art world descends for the Biennale and its collateral events. For the 2017 edition, Hirst’s installation “Treasure from the Wreck of the Unbelievable,” shown at François Pinault’s two Venetian art spaces (the Palazzo Grassi and Punta della Dogana) was the year’s most buzzed about event—for all the wrong reasons. The exhibition presented sculptures supposedly saved from the waters of the Indian Ocean, off the coast of East Africa, after a shipwreck. Spread across more than 53,800 square feet, the exhibition descriptions led visitors to believe that scuba divers spent 10 years uncovering the works from this ancient shipwreck, described as belonging to a freed slave named Cif Amotan II (an anagram of “I am fiction”). Hirst even released a faux documentary outlining the scuba mission. Of course, it was all a fiction.
The show sparked controversy as some accused Hirst of cultural appropriation of the Yoruba art in one of his sculptures. Likewise, critics lambasted the exhibition, calling it “disastrous” and further evidence that the artist had run out of ideas long ago. Add to that the millions of dollar required to mount the show, and that everything on view was sale at an event that is considered outside the confines of the market.
Still, several top collectors bought works from it. In March 2022, property developer Knight Dragon announced that the towering 26-foot sculpture, Demon with Bowl, from the series would soon be installed in London, near the Thames, on Greenwich Peninsula; three other, smaller, works from the series are already installed on the peninsula.
Though no animals were harmed, per se, in the making of this show, an animal rights activist group called 100% Animalisti dumped eighty-eight pounds of manure outside the entrance of Palazzo Grassi, hanging a white banner that read: “Damien Hirst Go Home! Beccati Questa Opera D’arte! 100% Animalisti.”
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Miraculous Journey, 2018
Image Credit: Ammar Abd Rabbo/Abaca/Sipa USA via AP Images In Hirst’s Miraculous Journey, 14 bronze sculptures show the development of a fetus through various stages, culminating in a 46-foot-tall statue of a newborn baby. Commissioned by Sheikha al Mayassa Hamad bin Khalifa al-Thani— chairwoman of the Qatar Museums Authority, sister of Qatar’s Emir Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani, and one of the world’s top art collectors—the work is sited outside Sidra Medical and Research Centre for Women and Children in Doha.
The sculptures originally debuted in 2013, but were subsequently covered for five years and re-unveiled in 2018. Officials said the sculptures were covered due to building renovations, though many speculated that it was actually because of public outcry over the portrayal of nudity and criticism of cultural insensitivity toward the country’s Muslim majority.
Speaking to Doha News in 2018, Hirst said “I suppose the cultural differences are a bit difficult. You know in England, there wouldn’t be a problem with a naked baby, you see the embryo and the egg and sperm. You know culturally, it’s the first naked sculpture in the Middle East. … It’s very brave of Sheikha Mayassa to go with the whole thing.”