Damien Hirst

Damien Hirst is some guy that people call an artist. He got famous in the 1990s for putting dead animals in tanks of formaldehyde (and calling it art). Some people found this disturbing, or awe-inspiring. People who talk about stuff like this think this was a major thing in the 90s and in British art.

He caused a big controversy in 2024 because it got leaked that he made a few animal-in-formaldehyde artworks in 2017 and gave them 1990s dates. (Apparently it would look bad, or at least not as cool, if he kept doing this in the 2010s.) His justification for doing this is that they're concept art, and the dates he gave them are the dates of their conception [in his mind], and that he has the legal right to assign whatever dates he wants to his art. This is despite the fact that nobody else dates their artwork that way, and nobody is going to take the date of an art to mean the date that the artist came up with the idea. The logic he was using was also made-up.

This was such a big deal that several journalists and/or columnists who used to think Hirst was the shit decided to write pieces about it. This might matter in the sense that Hirst was being dishonest about his work. He also gets money for his art, so manipulation of prices/other compensation might also be a factor. Another possibility is that he thought he was doing performance art by faking the dates of his art, and I'm just playing into his pretensions by writing about it.