English artist Damien Hirst is coming under intense scrutiny this week after claims he dated more than 1,000 artworks from his NFT project ‘The currency’, The Guardian reported on Wednesday.
Damian Hirst under fire for NFT project after Exposé
The controversial artist, perhaps best known for his works depicting animals preserved in formaldehyde, reportedly misrepresented the actual dates of an estimated 10% of the 10,000 physical paintings included in ‘The Coin’, all of which matched with a matching NFT.
Launched in 2021 and sold for $2,000, Hirst claimed that all of the physical paintings included in the NFT project were made by hand in 2016.
Sources who spoke to The Guardian claimed that the dotted paintings were mass-produced in Britain in 2018 and 2019 by almost a dozen artists on a ‘Henry Ford production line’.
More artworks by Damien Hirst were created years later than claimed, research shows https://t.co/075Ly2JVU3 #nft #nftnews #nfts
— Kyked (@kykednft) May 23, 2024
“It was very annoying,” a source told The Guardian. “There were a lot of sheets on these tables, and they were quite low, so you had to bend down to make the spots. After a while, some people got RSI injuries.”
Footage showing multiple paintings, shot from Hirst’s studio in 2019 and verified by the media, corroborates the allegations.
Lawyers for Hirst did not deny the claims, stating that the 2016 marker represents the conceptual date of Hirst’s ‘The Valuta’ rather than the physical production date of each painting.
Physical copies of Damien Hirst’s ‘The Currency’ NFTs are going up in smoke
Buyers of ‘The Coin’ were allowed to keep the physical painting or the digital twin, but not both. In 2022, Hirst burned the physical versions of those who opted for the NFT to effectively digitally transfer the value of each painting.
“A lot of people think I’m burning millions of dollars worth of art, but that’s not the case,” Hirst told the BBC at the time. “I complete the transformation of these physical works of art into NFTs by burning the physical versions.”
Backdating, the process of giving a work of art an inaccurate date indicating when it was created, is largely frowned upon in the art world.
This is not the first time Hirst has been accused of falsely dating a piece. The Guardian published an exposé in March revealing that three of his formaldehyde sculptures from the 1990s were actually created in 2017.
If true, the allegations could damage Hirst’s already scrutinized reputation, call into question the legitimacy of his works and potentially lower the value of his NFT project.