New plagiarism claims have been leveled against Damien Hirst, the YBA enfant terrible turned conceptual art megastar whose formaldehyde-immersed animals, diamond encrusted skulls and coloured spot paintings have drawn as much derision as they have acclaim and, indeed, money.
The accusations were made by fellow artist Charles Thomson, the co-founder of Stuckism, an anti-conceptual art movement that first started in 1999 (so there’s certainly an agenda there). The claims were made after Thomson assembled 15 examples of Hirst’s supposed acts of plagiarism for the most recent issue of art magazine Jackdaw, citing eight new examples including Hirst’s ‘Pharmacy’ – an installation that draws inspiration, Thompson claims, from a 1943 work by Joseph Cornell.
Thomson also claims that Hirst’s re-appropriation of other artists’ work would be unacceptable in other industries: “Hirst puts himself forward as a great artist, but a lot of his work exists only because other artists have come up with original ideas which he has stolen…Hirst is a plagiarist in a way that would be totally unacceptable in science or literature.“
You can read Thomson’s damning appraisal of Hirst’s work below…
Via The Guardian
