Damning Damien Hirst for publicity stunts is like panning Van Gogh for painting flowers

Damien Hirst has always had an extraordinary instinct for picking his moments. Back in his student days at London’s Goldsmiths, he made a thunderous impact on the London art scene with a show that would one day be credited with launching the world-changing Young British Artists (YBA) phenomenon. You can currently see him as a spiky-haired 23-year-old on the BBC Two documentary Sensationalists, moving through the crowds at the opening of his 1988 exhibition Freeze, a show that made it clear that a new energy and enterprise were afoot in the staid London art world. At a time when the national mood had been dampened by endless financial crises, Hirst’s sheer punky audacity gave British culture the shot in the arm it needed.

Cut to today, and Hirst in his 2022 incarnation – a short, balding 57-year-old – is calmly feeding pieces of his own art into the flames of a glass-fronted furnace. A bit thicker set than in that video, Hirst still cuts a dash in silver trousers and gauntlets as he directs the Burn Event, the climax of his The Currency project, which will see approaching £10m worth of his paintings torched in daily immolations before the work and its accompanying exhibition close on 30 October.

But was the whole thing just a publicity stunt, designed to bag headlines and wind up his critics? It has, predictably, been condemned as such from the moment it was announced in July. But such a charge seems ludicrous, considering we’re looking at a man who made himself the world’s richest artist – for a time – by turning his every move into a global media event. From the dead shark to the diamond skull, the lesson of Hirst’s career has been that the art, the money, the performance and the publicity are all one entity. Damning him for a “publicity stunt” is like panning Van Gogh for painting too many sunflowers. Where have the British media been for the past quarter-century?

This week, I witnessed the artist and his so-called “stunt” at his Newport Street Gallery. Assistants in orange boilersuits fed five furnaces from stacks of tiny Hirst paintings-on-paper. Hirst himself moved through it all, superbly unflappable, throwing out occasional comments to the assembled media in that unmistakeable, droll Yorkshire voice. “Why are you destroying your work?” someone called. “I’m not destroying it,” he snapped back. “I’m transforming it – into NFTs.”

Given the event comes after what has seemed an increasingly fallow period for Britain’s most notorious artist, it’s easy to understand why he’d be keen to let us know he’s still very much in business. A lockdown project of an NHS-supporting butterfly-rainbow seemed astonishingly lame, while a year-long series of exhibitions at Gagosian’s Britannia Street gallery made few waves. But if destroying his own art in public (the event is being live-streamed around the world) might seem a drastic, even desperate, way to make a comeback, nothing happens in Hirst World without intense and detailed calculation.

The Currency, a plan to create art that is literally money by selling 10,000 unique digital artworks at $2,000 (£1,785) each and letting the market determine their value, might look like a jump on the recent non-fungible token (NFT) wave. But it’s actually been in production since 2016. The 10,000 A5-size works, all variants on Hirst’s Op Art-flavoured spot paintings, are displayed in plastic screens that fill Newport Street’s lofty galleries from floor to ceiling. Buyers are given a choice between acquiring the physical, signed work or opting for the NFT version, which may or may not achieve a higher value, but feels a more daring leap into the future.

The “real” works, taken away by buyers, are represented on the screens by washed-out, monochrome images of the originals. The thousands of brightly coloured works that remain, all painted on handmade paper, are, paradoxically – and a touch unnervingly – the art that will be destroyed.

There’s nothing new in artists burning their art as part of their art. American conceptualist John Baldessari, for example, made biscuits from the ashes of an entire decade’s work. But I doubt it’s been done on quite this cold-blooded, industrial scale before.

open image in gallery

Yet as significant as the art itself is the moment in which Hirst has chosen to launch it: the 25th anniversary of the opening of the infamous Sensation exhibition at the Royal Academy. Following on from the cult success of Freeze, Sensation launched the YBA on the country at large in a blaze of tabloid-fuelled publicity. It helped establish Hirst as an artist with an unnerving knack of timing his exhibitions, sales and launches at moments that coincided both with propitious art-market forces and with wider historical events.

His 2008 Sotheby’s sale, for example, yielded an unprecedented $200m (£179m) on the very day that share prices plummeted in the biggest financial crash of recent times. If flooding the market with his work caused a decline in his prices, even that was seen by many as somehow part of the masterplan.

By 2012 Hirst seemed an essentially historical figure, the embodiment of the brash hype-driven art of the late Nineties/early 2000s boom years. Now he is back with an idea that makes the correlation of art, value and the selling process more explicit than ever. There’s even a counter in the foyer indicating how values are changing even as we visit the show.

open image in gallery

The dinky, spotty little artworks may not extend Hirst’s imagery by one millimetre. But simply as an exhibition, The Currency is a brilliant visualisation of commercial processes that generally remain invisible in art. Ultimately, however, the whole project, particularly the “burn events”, feels numbingly nihilistic. On the one hand, there is almost too much belief, as Hirst buys – apparently wholesale – into the “transformative” mystique of a process and a phenomenon (the NFT) that has little real substance.

On the other, Hirst demonstrates once and for all that the physical works that have sustained his career-long assault on the art world are in themselves worthless and meaningless, or certainly for him. And of course, he didn’t do these paintings himself – they are created by his team of assistants. The larger metaphors implied in the substituting of one form of value and one form of reality for another don’t materialise.

This event fell on the day the Bank of England announced it cannot continue buying government bonds to prop up pension funds, and at a time when the world faces a genuine threat of nuclear war. For once, Hirst’s timing, his choice of moment, seemed out of touch with wider events. Amid our global desperation, his preoccupations with the reality and illusion of art’s value feel essentially trivial.