So by “art school legalese” you mean bullshit, because that’s definitely not what the law says.
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It feels like it’s performance art - you’re paying for the process of being fleeced, and the tangible “art piece” is a participation trophy.
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Did he personally falsify the dates on the art pieces? Or did he just have a legion of uncredited art-worker- bees determine the date? Because if it’s the former, it might be some sort of personal breakthrough.
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The post omits the part about how the NFT buyers had a time period to choose between (1) receiving the physical mass-produced piece, and (2) keeping the NFT and Hirst literally burning the corresponding physical piece on video. Slightly more than half the buyers chose the physical piece (at - if what I’ve read is correct and my math sucks less than usual - ~$1,800 apiece). And slightly fewer than half own a blockchain-verified digital image and a video of a middle aged man burning crap visual art - also at ~$1,800 apiece.
Is it good? I dunno, the visual piece sparks no delight for me. But the hype-destruction-context-stunt-questioning ownership-questioning what is real-story certainly plucks a lot of our societal strings and gets people (like us!) talking about some real, and important, ideas.
That is the art doing its fuckin’ work! And in that sense, it’s successful art. Hirst’s fame and cynical lucre is a key element.
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Reminds me a point made recently here on the BBS about how during the Gold Rushes more money was made selling shovels and tents and clean laundry and other “mining services” than was ever extracted from the ground.
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Same thing with Felix Gonzalez-Torres whose art consisted of unaltered, store-bought items: A pile of candy in the corner of a room (“Portrait of Ross in L.A.”), two identical clocks side-by-side on a wall (“Perfect Lovers”), or the string of lightbulbs (“Untitled, America #3”) that sold this month for $13 million.
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I think I remember seeing that getting painted on a documentary years ago. It wasn’t Damian Hirst who was doing the painting, but I remember him talking to the camera and justifying it because he came up with the idea.
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If he isn’t doing the actual painting, then he’s not the artist; I don’t care what anyone else says.
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But of course, didn’t Warhol come up with the idea of having someone else do the physical labor, especially with the screen printing stuff? 
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Yeah, few people are as divisive of Warhol! 
Agreed.
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Back-dating his works [likely to make more money] is perhaps the most artistic thing he’s done in his career.
I have mixed feelings about MSCHF, but one of their projects that made me LOL was when they cut up one of Hirst’s stupid dot paintings, that he almost never makes himself, and sold the individual dots.
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No the practice existed already, he did have workers and assistants though. Behind many a modern artist was a great assistant, but it was a practice going back centuries.
For specialised practices, like screen-printing, employing experienced technicians is essential.
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The only Hirst piece I like - and that’s because of the audacity of the people who commissioned it - is the dot painting that was sent to Mars on the Beagle 2 lander as a colour calibration target for the lander’s cameras:
That might be worth something. Buyer collects.
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Heraclitus said something that I’ve seen translated as “Although the Law of Reason is common, the majority of people live as though their ideas were their own”
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But what if he’s doing the actual burning?
There is Sol Lewitt whose wall drawings begin with a series of instructions to be executed by others. The point is that each installation will be subtly different… different hands, different place.
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I used to feel this way about Andy too. But he’s worth a deeper look. It’s not really about the art he made, it’s about the concepts behind them. Andy’s greatest work of art was himself.
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Okay.
Good day to you.
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