Damien Hirst and plagiarism: ‘All my ideas are stolen anyway'

Times

16 hours ago

The Shorter Oxford English Dictionary defines the verb to plagiarise as follows:
'1 v.t. Take and use as one's own (the thoughts, writings, inventions, etc., of another person); copy (literary work, ideas, etc.) improperly or without acknowledgement; pass off the thoughts, work, etc., of (another person) as one's own. 2 v.i. Practise or commit plagiarism.'
Damien Hirst, who has been accused, not for the first time, of pinching the idea for his best work, A Thousand Years (1990) — the one with the cow's head, the maggots and the insect-o-cutor in a vitrine — from his Goldsmiths contemporary Hamad Butt, is probably used to it by now.
Indeed, in 2018 he stated in a filmed interview with fellow artist Peter Blake, 'All my ideas are stolen anyway,' claiming that he was told by his tutor Michael Craig-Martin, 'Don't borrow ideas, steal them' (possibly Craig-Martin had Picasso's famous adage in mind: 'Good artists copy, great artists steal'). That, Hirst said, was when he realised 'you don't have to be original' — and Blake agreed. 'Nothing is original — it's what you do with it.'
Still, Butt's Transmission, which is about to go on show at the Whitechapel Gallery in London as part of Apprehensions, the first big survey exhibition of his work, does indeed have remarkable similarities in its ideas and execution to Hirst's work.
Shown at Butt's degree show, also in 1990, but developed earlier in prototype in his studio (and seen there, claimed Butt, by Hirst, who overlapped with him at Goldsmiths for two years), it was a multipart work, one element of which was Fly-Piece, a cabinet containing sugar-soaked paper inscribed with enigmatic statements, and fly pupae, which hatched, digested the paper and then died.
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It doesn't take a genius to see why Butt, who died of Aids-related complications in 1994 aged 32, felt Hirst had appropriated his work, and the critic Jean Fisher, who taught both artists, referred to Butt's 'clear influence on Hirst'. The Times approached Hirst for comment.
But this is just one of many times Hirst has been accused of plagiarism, which in art is notoriously difficult to prove.
In 2010 Charles Thomson, founder of the stuckists, collated a list of 15 examples for Jackdaw Magazine. Some were supported by the artists in question, such as the Los Angeles artist Lori Precious, who said she went into 'a state of shock' after seeing Hirst's butterfly works and noting their resemblance to her mandala works made of butterflies. (Hirst has never publicly acknowledged Precious's remarks, which were not made through legal representation, and told Blake that he got the idea from Victorian tea trays.) Some were Thomson's assertion, such as the similarity between Hirst's early medicine cabinet works and Joseph Cornell's 1943 sculpture Pharmacy. Hirst's press officer at the time described the article as 'poor journalism' and said they would be issuing a 'comprehensive rebuttal'. If this exists, I can't find it.
John LeKay, once a good friend of Hirst's, has claimed the artist has repurposed a number of his ideas, including skulls covered in crystals, which LeKay first experimented with in 1993, and has intimated that Hirst's In the Name of the Father, 2005, which featured the corpse of a sheep splayed to resemble a crucifixion pose, was probably inspired by his own 1987 work This Is My Body, This Is My Blood, which does the same thing but without preserving it in formaldehyde.
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LeKay also claimed that Hirst got the ideas for his pickled animal works from a catalogue LeKay lent him, for the Carolina Biological Supply Company, which sold science education products (which is a perfectly reasonable and valid place to get ideas — they don't usually just come out of thin air). Hirst declined to comment on the claims.
He did agree, in 2000, to pay an undisclosed sum, out of court, to two children's charities when Humbrol took umbrage at his large-scale bronze sculpture Hymn, describing it as a direct copy of the company's Young Scientist Anatomy Set, designed by Norman Emms (apparently Hirst's young son had one).
Mostly, though, claims have gone unanswered. In 2017 Jason deCaires Taylor claimed there were 'striking similarities' between his underwater sculptural installations, which he has been making since 2006, and the works that made up Hirst's Treasures from the Wreck of the Unbelievable, exhibited at that year's Venice Biennale. Hirst denied that he had breached copyright and a spokeswoman said he had been interested in 'coralised' objects since the 1990s.
In 2022 he exhibited a suite of paintings of cherry blossom at the Fondation Cartier in Paris, which depicted dark branches against a pale blue sky, with petals made of dots. The English artist and writer Joe Machine told a newspaper that he thought when he saw them that he was looking at his own earlier paintings. (A stretch, to be honest. Stylistically they're not particularly similar and it's not as if artists haven't been painting cherry blossoms for centuries. To me, they just look like Hirst has rather savvily combined his dot motif with a tried-and-tested subject matter to appeal to the large east Asian market.)
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The fact is you cannot copyright an idea. It's true that Thomas Downing was doing spot paintings in the Sixties. So did John Armeleder in the Eighties. Part of the fury around Hirst's alleged appropriation of ideas is that he's made so much more money out of them than anyone else — his success has created its own market, regardless of the quality of the work, which is variable to say the least.
I doubt this latest, repeated accusation will make the slightest difference to Hirst's reputation. People know what they're getting with him, and Butt's Transmission, which the Whitechapel will show with the insect component remade for the first time since his degree show (Butt reportedly destroyed Fly-Piece after Hirst's work was shown) is likely to remain a frustrating footnote in art history.
And as Dominic Johnson, curator of the exhibition, carefully remarks in the catalogue: 'It's always interesting to consider how and where artists get ideas from especially when working in shared spaces or contexts (as was the case for so many of the YBAs and their peers), as there is inevitably always going to be a degree of cross-pollination — conscious or unconscious.'
Still, Picasso's pithy soundbite doesn't mean that stealing makes you a great artist. Mediocre artists steal too. And maybe the suggestion that A Thousand Years, in my opinion Hirst's finest work (he made it aged 25; he's 60 now and nothing he's done since has been as good, not even the shark), was heavily reliant on someone else's idea might, on darker nights, give Hirst a moment's pause.