Damien Hirst: The Shark, the Skull, and the Business of Death

The Shark, the Skull, and the Business of Death (Born 1965)

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From Leeds to London

Damien Hirst was born on June 7, 1965, in Bristol, England, but grew up in Leeds in northern England. Damien Hirst’s father was a car salesman who left the family when Damien Hirst was twelve. Damien Hirst was raised by his mother, who encouraged his early interest in art despite his difficult behavior—Damien Hirst was arrested twice for shoplifting as a teenager.

Damien Hirst’s fascination with death and the body began early. As a teenager, Damien Hirst visited the anatomy department at Leeds Medical School to draw cadavers. Later, while studying at art college, Damien Hirst worked part-time in a mortuary. These experiences profoundly shaped Damien Hirst’s art, giving him an intimate familiarity with death that would become his central subject.

In 1986, Damien Hirst enrolled at Goldsmiths College in London, one of Britain’s most progressive art schools. At Goldsmiths, Damien Hirst found a community of ambitious young artists who rejected traditional boundaries between high art and popular culture. Damien Hirst’s tutors encouraged conceptual approaches to art-making, emphasizing ideas over technical skill.

Freeze: The Exhibition That Changed Everything

In 1988, while still a student, Damien Hirst organized an exhibition called “Freeze” in a disused London Port Authority building in Docklands. Damien Hirst didn’t just show his own work—he curated pieces by his fellow Goldsmiths students and arranged corporate sponsorship to fund the catalogue and private view.

Damien Hirst’s Freeze exhibition is now considered the founding moment of the Young British Artists movement. The show attracted the attention of Charles Saatchi, the advertising mogul and art collector who would become Damien Hirst’s most important patron. Saatchi recognized that Damien Hirst and his contemporaries represented something new—art that was brash, media-savvy, and unafraid of controversy.

The YBAs—including Damien Hirst, Tracey Emin, Sarah Lucas, and the Chapman Brothers—dominated the British art scene throughout the 1990s. They attracted tabloid headlines, provoked public outrage, and achieved commercial success on a scale unprecedented for living artists. At the center of it all was Damien Hirst, the most famous and most bankable of them all.

“I just wanted to find out where belief came from… I wanted to know why we believe in things.”

Damien Hirst

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The Physical Impossibility of Death

In 1991, Charles Saatchi offered to fund whatever artwork Damien Hirst wanted to make. Damien Hirst’s response was audacious: he commissioned a fisherman in Australia to catch a tiger shark, then had the 14-foot creature shipped to London and preserved in a glass tank filled with formaldehyde.

Damien Hirst titled the work “The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living.” When it was exhibited at the Saatchi Gallery in 1992, it caused a sensation. Here was a real shark—a creature people feared—suspended in blue-green liquid, frozen in the moment of attack. Viewers could walk around it, stare into its dead eyes, contemplate their own mortality.

The shark made Damien Hirst famous overnight. The tabloids loved it: was this art or was this a joke? Damien Hirst didn’t care about the distinction. The controversy was part of the work. Damien Hirst had created something that forced people to think about death—and about what art could be.

In 2004, Saatchi sold the shark to the hedge fund manager Steven A. Cohen for a reported $8-12 million. The original shark had deteriorated and was replaced with a new specimen in 2006. Damien Hirst’s shark remains one of the most iconic artworks of the late twentieth century—a symbol of the YBA movement and of the explosive growth of the contemporary art market.

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Spot Paintings and Spin Paintings

Not all of Damien Hirst’s work involves dead animals. From the late 1980s, Damien Hirst developed two signature painting series: the spot paintings and the spin paintings.

Damien Hirst’s spot paintings consist of rows of colored circles on white backgrounds. The colors are randomly selected, and the spots are arranged in a grid. Damien Hirst has produced over 1,400 spot paintings, making them among the most recognizable contemporary artworks in the world. Crucially, most of Damien Hirst’s spot paintings were executed not by Damien Hirst himself but by his assistants—raising questions about authorship that Damien Hirst has cheerfully embraced.

Damien Hirst’s spin paintings are created by pouring paint onto a circular canvas that rotates at high speed. The centrifugal force spreads the paint in unpredictable patterns. Damien Hirst has compared the process to a fairground game—it’s partly chance, partly controlled. The spin paintings are bright, exuberant, and have proved highly popular with collectors.

Both series have been phenomenally successful commercially. Damien Hirst has been criticized for mass-producing these works with factory-like efficiency, but he has defended the approach. Damien Hirst sees the art market itself as part of his artistic practice—the buying and selling, the hype and speculation, are all part of the game.

Medicine Cabinets and Pharmacy

Another major theme in Damien Hirst’s work is medicine and pharmaceuticals. Damien Hirst has created numerous medicine cabinets—vitrines filled with neatly arranged pill bottles and surgical instruments, displayed with the reverence usually reserved for religious relics.

In 1992, Damien Hirst opened a restaurant in London called Pharmacy, decorated with his pharmaceutical-themed artworks. The restaurant became a celebrity hangout and a showcase for Damien Hirst’s vision of art integrated into everyday life. When Pharmacy closed in 2003, Damien Hirst sold its contents at auction for £11 million.

Damien Hirst’s medicine works explore our faith in science and technology. We place our trust in pills and procedures to save us from death—but of course, they never can. Damien Hirst sees parallels between medicine and religion: both promise salvation, both require belief, and neither can ultimately deliver immortality.

“I think money is something that can stop you from achieving what you want. The more money you make, the more you think about money.”

Damien Hirst

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For the Love of God

In 2007, Damien Hirst unveiled his most audacious work yet: “For the Love of God,” a platinum cast of an eighteenth-century human skull covered with 8,601 flawless diamonds, including a 52.4-carat pink diamond in the forehead. The work cost £14 million to produce and was listed for sale at £50 million.

Damien Hirst’s diamond skull became an instant icon—and a lightning rod for criticism. Was this art or bling? Was Damien Hirst making a profound statement about mortality and materialism, or was he just showing off his wealth? Damien Hirst seemed to enjoy the controversy, noting that the title came from his mother’s exasperated response when he told her about the project.

The skull was eventually sold to an investment consortium that included Damien Hirst himself. Critics accused Damien Hirst of artificially inflating the sale price, but Damien Hirst maintained that the work addressed “the maximum celebration you could make against death.” Whether sincere meditation or cynical spectacle, “For the Love of God” captured the excess and ambition of the pre-2008 art market.

Beautiful Inside My Head Forever

On September 15, 2008—the same day that Lehman Brothers collapsed, triggering the global financial crisis—Damien Hirst made art history by selling a complete exhibition directly at auction, bypassing his galleries entirely. The sale at Sotheby’s, titled “Beautiful Inside My Head Forever,” raised £111 million ($198 million), breaking the record for a single-artist auction.

The star lot was “The Golden Calf,” a bull with 18-carat gold horns and hooves preserved in formaldehyde. Damien Hirst’s golden calf sold for £10.3 million. The auction demonstrated Damien Hirst’s extraordinary commercial power—and his willingness to disrupt traditional art-world hierarchies.

Damien Hirst’s 2008 auction has been criticized as the peak of art-market excess, a sign of a bubble about to burst. But Damien Hirst saw it differently. By selling directly to collectors, Damien Hirst was cutting out the middlemen and taking control of his own market. Whether genius or hubris, it was pure Damien Hirst.

Controversies and Criticisms

Damien Hirst has faced numerous controversies throughout his career. Critics have accused Damien Hirst of plagiarism, noting similarities between his works and those of other artists. In 2000, Damien Hirst’s sculpture “Hymn,” a 20-foot bronze based on an anatomical model, was found to closely resemble a toy manufactured by Humbrol. Legal proceedings resulted in an out-of-court settlement.

Damien Hirst has also been criticized for his use of assistants to produce his work. The vast majority of Damien Hirst’s spot paintings were painted by others—Damien Hirst has reportedly completed only about 25 himself. This has led to questions about authenticity and authorship, though Damien Hirst argues that the idea is what matters, not the physical execution.

Animal rights groups have condemned Damien Hirst’s formaldehyde works. The RSPCA investigated after 9,000 butterflies died during Damien Hirst’s 2012 exhibition “In and Out of Love” at Tate Modern. Damien Hirst defended the installation as natural—butterflies, after all, have short lives.

Later Career

In recent years, Damien Hirst has explored new directions. Damien Hirst has returned to painting, creating large canvases of cherry blossoms that some critics have dismissed as sentimental but which have proved popular with collectors. In 2017, Damien Hirst staged “Treasures from the Wreck of the Unbelievable” in Venice, an elaborate installation presenting fake archaeological artifacts as if recovered from an ancient shipwreck.

Damien Hirst has also embraced NFTs (non-fungible tokens). In 2021, Damien Hirst launched “The Currency,” a project involving 10,000 unique works on paper, each linked to an NFT. Buyers had to choose whether to keep the physical work or the NFT—if they kept the NFT, Damien Hirst burned the physical artwork.

Now in his late fifties, Damien Hirst remains a dominant figure in contemporary art. Damien Hirst’s influence extends beyond his own work—he helped create the template for the artist as brand, the exhibition as event, the auction as spectacle. Love him or hate him, Damien Hirst changed the rules of the game.

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Viewing Damien Hirst’s Work

Damien Hirst’s work is held in major collections worldwide, including Tate, the Museum of Modern Art, and numerous private collections. “The Physical Impossibility of Death” is owned by Steven A. Cohen. Damien Hirst also operates his own gallery and museum spaces.

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Explore Damien Hirst’s formaldehyde works and spot paintings at the Tate