At least 1,000 paintings that artist Damien Hirst said were “made in 2016” were created several years later, the Guardian can reveal.
Hirst produced 10,000 of the paintings, each consisting of colorful hand-painted dots on A4 paper, as part of a project called The Currency which emerged from the idea of creating a form of money from art.
The year 2016 was engraved on the works next to the artist’s signature. Hirst and the paintings’ authorized seller repeatedly said the physical works were created in 2016.
When they went on sale in 2021, in a high-profile event that gave buyers the opportunity to acquire a permanent digital record of the paintings in the form of a non-fungible token (NFT), Hirst said this was “the most exciting project I have ever worked on”.
The first sale grossed approximately $18 million. Hirst said of the project at the time: “It consists of 10,000 NFTs, each corresponding to a unique physical work of art created in 2016.”
The paintings were sold through a single authorized seller, Heni, managed by Hirst’s business manager. It said at the time that the works were “handmade in 2016”.
However, five sources familiar with the works’ creation, including some of the painters who put the dots to paper, told the Guardian that many of the works had been mass-produced in 2018 and 2019.
Their records show that at least 1,000 – and possibly several thousand – paintings from The Coin series were created over the two-year period. They were produced by dozens of painters hired by Hirst’s company Science Ltd in two studios, in Gloucestershire and London, in what one source described as a “Henry Ford production line”.
Each painting was marked with a microdot, an embossed stamp of authenticity, and a penciled title, date, and signature on the back. It is commonly believed that dates attributed to works of art refer to the year in which they were completed.
Contacted for comment, lawyers for Hirst and Science did not dispute that at least 1,000 of the paintings that the artist said dated from 2016 were painted several years later. They did not respond to questions about why Hirst had explicitly said the physical artworks were “created in 2016.”
However, they denied that Hirst had been deliberately misleading, arguing that it was his “usual practice” to date physical works in a conceptual art project with the date of the project’s conception, which in the case of The Coin was 2016.
Hirst and Science made a similar argument in March, after The Guardian revealed that several well-known formaldehyde sculptures made by pickling animals were dated by his company to the 1990s, even though they were made in 2017.
At the time, Hirst’s lawyers said he sometimes used different approaches to dating works, adding: “Artists have every right to be (and often are) inconsistent in their dating of works.”
Several of the outdated formaldehydes had been on display dating back to the 1990s in galleries in Hong Kong, New York, Munich, London and Oxford. One of them, a four-meter tiger shark, was sold for about $8 million to Las Vegas billionaires.
The Monet paintings, on the other hand, were intended for the mass market when they went on sale in 2021. They sold for $2,000 each and gave regular buyers the chance to acquire a genuine Hirst work of art or an NFT equivalent.
“What if I made this and treated it like money?”
According to sources familiar with the production of The Currency series, dozens of artists were hired in 2018 and 2019 to help produce the factory-style paintings. Some worked eight hours a day for months, wearing cumbersome masks to protect against the paint fumes.
Their workstations were long tables spread throughout Hirst’s studios, with dozens of pages spread out along them. Each sheet of paper was decorated with a hologram, a watermark of Hirst’s head and a microdot. Artists moved carefully around each painting, adding a colorful dot to each page in turn.
“It was very annoying,” one artist remembers. Another said: “There were a lot of sheets on these tables, and they were quite low, so you had to constantly bend down to cover the spots. After a while, some people got RSI injuries.”
Lawyers for Hirst and Science said they always adhered to relevant health and safety rules and practices.
Paintings were worked on in the workshops all week and left to dry at the weekend, sources said. Special drying racks were purchased to speed up the process. The Guardian has seen footage, apparently filmed in or after 2019, showing hundreds of works of art being displayed on tables as artists paint dots on them, before carefully stacking them on drying racks.
When asked exactly how many of the 10,000 paintings were made after 2016, Hirst and Science did not respond.
For the five sources, who witnessed the production process at different times in 2018 and 2019, it was difficult to give an exact number of the total number of paintings produced during that period. However, their records show that more than 1,000 were made at the time – the actual number may have been several times greater.
It is unclear exactly why Hirst needed more paintings. A plausible explanation is that he had to create 10,000 individual pieces to enable a sale with NFTs, which at the time were seen as a potentially lucrative novelty in the art market.
Hirst created The Currency paintings in 2016, which are reminiscent of his much larger spot paintings. He has described starting with just a few hundred. “And when I looked at them, I thought they were quite unique, but they all look the same; they are handmade, so they look like a print, but they are not a print,” he said. “And then I thought, ‘What if I made this and then treated it like money?'”
Joe Hage, the artist’s longtime manager and founder of the Heni sales platform, told Bloomberg that Hirst only became aware of NFTs two years later, in 2018. “And so he started planning an NFT project,” Hage said.
NFTs, which allow artists to sell digital works of art using blockchain technology, threatened to upend the art market at the time. Last year saw the launch of CryptoPunks, which sold computer-generated images of cartoon character heads linked to blockchain tokens to buyers. The collection included 10,000 different NFTs, which were traded for enormous amounts of money.
Andrea Baronchelli, a professor who leads on cryptocurrenices and NFTs at the Alan Turing Institute in London, said that after CryptoPunks, issuing 10,000 works of art became a standard that was copied by other future art projects. Jon Sharples, an art and intellectual property attorney at Howard Kennedy, agreed that 10,000 was “the magic number for an NFT art project” at the time.
In his 2021 comments, Hirst seemed to suggest that 10,000 paintings was for some reason the optimal number for the project. After making a few hundred, he said, he realized he needed more. “I thought: what if I made more than 500, what if I made, say, 1,000 or 5,000? So I made 5,000, and then we looked at it and we realized that 5,000 wasn’t enough, we need to make 10,000 to have enough to travel around like that.”
When all works went on sale in July 2021, Heni was the only seller. It also repeatedly referred to the physical creation of all paintings as 2016. “The physical works of art were handmade in 2016 using enamel paint on handmade paper,” according to Heni promotional material. “Each artwork is numbered, titled, stamped and signed by the artist on the back.”
Contacted for comment on these comments, Heni’s lawyers said: “All artistic decisions are made by the artist. Our customer follows his approach and logic.” Heni’s law firm, Joseph Hage Aaronson, also represents Hirst and Science. Hage is a partner in the company.
In response to questions on behalf of Hirst and Science, the lawyers rejected any suggestion that the artist’s dating practices were commercially driven. They said Hirst believed it was “correct” that physical artworks in a conceptual project should be dated by the year of conception, “which is not necessarily the date on which any particular object in the project was physically created.”
However, that was not the approach Hirst took with two of the 10,000 paintings, images of which are available online. When the Guardian examined all 10,000 images, it found that while 9,998 were from 2016, there were, curiously, two exceptions: a painting titled 4778. It’s so heavenly, dated 2018, and another called 1321. I kept going up which was given a 2021 date.
Hirst’s lawyers said these two paintings were anomalies that had been “wrongly misdated following subsequent changes to the naming and title of the works”.
Hirst’s paintings go up in flames during a ceremonial burning
By July 2021, Hirst had collected enough A4 paintings to support one of the most high-profile art events of the year.
The artist’s works, which can fetch millions, are seen as the domain of the global financial elite. The Currency Sale gave ordinary art lovers the chance to get their hands on an authentic Hirst painting – or its NFT equivalent.
But buyers couldn’t have both. In an unusual twist, the physical paintings would be destroyed if buyers opted for the digital version in the form of an NFT.
In total, buyers chose to keep the physical versions of 5,149 paintings. Hirst kept 1,000 of the works, although he chose to keep them as NFT versions. So did the buyers of nearly 4,000 A4 paintings who chose a blockchain-based token knowing its physical incarnation would be burned.
And so in October 2022, during one of the art spectacles of the year, Hirst and his team burned almost half of the The Valuta paintings in his Newport Street Gallery in London.
Surrounded by cameras, he undertook a ceremonial destruction of some works. He held up paintings for the cameras and announced the titles before throwing them into a glass, wood-fired oven. “I actually like it more than I thought,” he joked to an assistant.
It was a theatrical moment that sparked even more discussion about the Turner Prize-winning artist and the questions he raised about the nature of art. But at its core, The Valuta project reaffirmed the authenticity of art. It was based on the idea that unique pieces – whether in physical form or in a blockchain token – were as immutable as money itself.
As Mark Carney, the former governor of the Bank of England, noted in a video promoting Hirst’s project: “Ultimately, money is based on trust… [art project] is also a feeling of trust – trust in the underlying art.”
Thousands of buyers of The Valuta works may now be wondering whether they can rely on the 2016 date printed on the back of their A4 multi-coloured Hirst painting, which the artist said was part of a collection “created in 2016”.