When Scandal Becomes a Medium
From sharks in formaldehyde and butterfly rooms to toy copyright lawsuits and diamond skulls, this essay looks at how Damien Hirst uses scandal as material, exposing the tight links between art, money, authorship and ethics in contemporary culture.
From sharks in formaldehyde and rooms full of live butterflies to toy copyright disputes and a diamond-encrusted skull, Damien Hirst has built a career on scandal and spectacle. This essay looks at his most controversial works and what they reveal about the relationship between contemporary art, money and ethics.
Why is Damien Hirst so controversial?
Damien Hirst is controversial because his work constantly tests the limits of what people consider acceptable in art: dead animals preserved in formaldehyde, rooms of live butterflies that slowly die, industrially produced paintings signed by him, and a diamond-encrusted skull priced like a financial stunt. Supporters see these works as sharp critiques of capitalism and belief; critics see cynicism and exploitation. Either way, the scandals around his art have become part of the medium itself.
“Does the artist create the scandal, or is it the scandal that creates the artist?”
With Damien Hirst, this question doesn’t feel theoretical at all. It feels like the basic material he’s working with – as real as formaldehyde, glass, and diamonds. The artworks exist, of course: the shark, the butterflies, the spot paintings, the skull. But around each one there is always something else: discomfort, gossip, anger, fascination, moral panic.
You can dislike him, admire him, or swing between the two. What’s harder is to pretend he doesn’t expose how tangled together art, money and ethics have become.
Death in a Tank
Hirst didn’t arrive quietly. Works like A Thousand Years (maggots, flies, a severed cow’s head, and an insect-o-cutor in a vitrine) and the famous tiger shark in formaldehyde were never meant to be neutral objects. You don’t “just” look at a shark in a tank; you feel your own body reacting. You also think of the dead animal, the collector’s cheque, the museum ticket, the magazine cover.
.jpg "Damien Hirst - A Thousand Years, 1990")
The scandal was built into the structure. Is it acceptable to kill animals for art? Is it really different from killing them for food? Are you looking at a profound reflection on death and image-culture, or at a very expensive horror prop?
Hirst never really answers any of this. Instead, he stages the dilemma and leaves us standing there with it. The work is as much about our unease as it is about the animal itself.
Butterflies and Complicity
The same ambiguity runs through his butterfly pieces. Whole rooms filled with live butterflies: hatching, flying, resting on paintings and visitors, and then slowly dying on the floor. The result is undeniably beautiful: a kind of living fresco, fragile and hypnotic.
But it’s also quietly brutal. You step carefully to avoid crushing them. You take photographs. You share them online. And at some point you realize that your aesthetic pleasure is built on a very literal expenditure of life.
Hirst doesn’t moralize. He doesn’t tell you whether this is right or wrong. He simply sets up a situation where beauty and guilt sit on the same surface, and you have to decide what exactly you are admiring.
The Toy That Got Too Big
One of the less famous but very telling episodes in Hirst’s career involves a child’s toy.
Around the turn of the millennium he produced Hymn, a monumental, brightly painted, six-metre-high sculpture of a standing anatomy figure, essentially a gigantic version of his young son’s plastic anatomy model, sold in shops as an educational toy. The resemblance was so direct that the designer of the toy and the manufacturer challenged him over copyright.
The dispute didn’t go to trial; it was settled, with a payment and donations. But the case quietly opened a very contemporary wound: when an artist takes a designed object from everyday life and simply enlarges it, where does authorship really sit? How much of the value is the original design, and how much is the act of scaling it up and placing it in a gallery?
In Hirst’s hands, the toy becomes a kind of secular idol: a giant flayed figure, half science diagram, half religious monument. The scandal is not a glitch, it’s almost the second layer of meaning. It forces us to look at how power, money and credit circulate in art.
Ghosts of Other Artists
Appropriation in Hirst’s work doesn’t stop at toys. Over the years, several artists and estates have raised questions about how close some of his pieces are to earlier works.
One particularly haunting comparison is with Hamad Butt, a British-Pakistani artist who died in the mid-1990s. Butt had already been making glass structures with insect-o-cutors, live insects and clinical, laboratory-like aesthetics before his death. When you put some of his pieces next to early Hirst works, the visual dialogue is difficult to ignore.
There is no court ruling, no official verdict saying “this is stolen” or “this is innocent influence.” What remains is a discomfort: one artist becomes globally famous, another almost disappears, even though their visual languages overlap at crucial points.
It’s here that a casual sentence often quoted from Hirst, “All my ideas are stolen anyway”, becomes more than a throwaway line. Said by a global art star, that kind of provocation doesn’t just sound cheeky; it exposes a power imbalance. Who can afford to call “stealing” a joke, and who can’t?
Patterns, Prints and the Thin Line
There have been other moments: for example, when a graphic artist noticed that one of Hirst’s colourful circle prints closely echoed a mathematical pattern he had created years earlier. Again, the clash wasn’t only about the form itself; it was about visibility.
Hirst repeatedly gravitates toward existing vocabularies: medical images, toy designs, diagrams, patterns, other artists’ experiments. He doesn’t always disguise the source, in some ways he amplifies it. For supporters, this is exactly the point: he shows how little innocence is left in the idea of the “original” image. For critics, it looks like a system that absorbs everything and redistributes credit upwards.
Either way, the story is no longer just about taste. It’s about who gets named, who gets forgotten, and how the market decides what counts as “genius.”
The Studio as Machine
Another recurrent controversy is the production of his work. Entire series, especially the Spot Paintings, are executed by teams of assistants in his studio, following strict rules. There are hundreds of canvases out there that bear his name but have never been touched by his hand.
People love to say: “A child could do that.” Hirst doesn’t disagree; he leans into it. The joke, of course, is that a child didn’t do it, a whole industrial structure did, under his direction.
Here Hirst is less the romantic artist than a kind of art CEO. This shocks people who still want the myth of the solitary genius, but historically, big studios full of assistants are nothing new. What makes Hirst different is the cold transparency: the admission that in our time, authorship has become a brand, and that brand can be stamped on a product made by many hands.
Again, the scandal feels almost intentional. It draws a circle around the question: what are we really buying when we buy a “Damien Hirst”?
Diamonds, Money and the Theatre of Value
Nothing exposes that question more brutally than For the Love of God, the diamond skull. A human skull cast in platinum, covered in thousands of diamonds, offered for an astronomical price.
.jpg "Damien Hirst - For the Love of God (2007)")
Is it about death? About luxury? About the obscene marriage of both? Or is it about the art world’s willingness to accept any figure, as long as it makes a good headline?
Even the rumours around its sale, who bought it, whether the artist was involved in the purchasing group, became part of the piece. The skull is not just an object, it’s a financial performance. It shows how value in art is a mix of material, story, and belief.
You can call it vulgar; you can also see it as a brutally honest portrait of how the market actually functions.
Beyond Villain or Hero
It’s tempting to cast Damien Hirst as a sort of comic-book villain of contemporary art: the man who kills animals, outsources paintings, inflates prices, borrows too freely. But that’s almost too easy, and, strangely, lets the rest of the system off the hook.
Hirst is not a glitch in an otherwise pure art world. He is what the art world looks like when its mechanisms are brought to the surface.
Animal suffering, invisible assistants, blurred authorship, speculative prices, forgotten predecessors, these are not unique to him. He simply amplifies them so much that we can’t pretend not to see them.
Does the artist create the scandal, or does the scandal create the artist? With Hirst, the answer is probably: both. He understands how scandal works and uses it as material. But the scandal also reveals things that would rather stay hidden: about money, hierarchy, and how much we are willing to forgive when the work is glamorous enough.
You don’t have to like him. You don’t have to defend him. But if you care about how art, ethics and capital collide today, it’s hard to deny that Damien Hirst is one of the clearest, and most uncomfortable, mirrors we have.