Damien Hirst has been accused of stealing the idea to use live flies in the breakthrough artwork that propelled him to success.
The 60-year-old conceptual creator’s piece A Thousand Years is alleged to have “appropriated” the work of Hamad Butt, according to a new exhibition dedicated to the artist, who died aged 32 in 1994.
Hirst’s artwork, which depicts a colony of flies feeding off a cow’s head, was considered a groundbreaking installation and was purchased by renowned businessman and art collector, Charles Saatchi.
Curator Dominic Johnson, a professor of performance and visual culture at Queen Mary University, has now claimed the idea to use live flies was used by Butt in June 1990, one month before Hirst.
Butt’s artwork Fly-Piece has been described as one of the “earliest works of bio-art in the UK”. Johnson has assembled Butt’s pieces for a new exhibition, titled Apprehensions, at Whitechapel Gallery – and in the exhibition guide, which has been seen by The Independent, Johnson writes that Hirst “appears to have directly appropriated from Butt”.
He wrote in the guide: “Friends and family recall Butt felt this was the case and that he was unhappy when Hirst’s sculpture received greater acclaim.
He added that Hirst “likely encountered Butt’s piece first-hand in its development” as they are believed to have studied at Goldsmiths University together. Butt died of Aids in 1994.
Johnson explained that Butt had created a prototype in his personal studio in 1989, saying: “Whether the appropriation was direct or not, Butt chose to withdraw the Fly-Piece from his subsequent installation [in November 1990]. The original vitrine is now lost.”
Hirst has declined to comment. He is widely considered to be Britain’s richest artist with a net worth in the region of £315m, and is known for his striking bio-art pieces including the infamous Mother and Child Divided (a cow and calf suspended in formaldehyde).
In Johnson’s guide, he added: “Jean Fisher, who taught both artists at Goldsmiths, observed Butt’s ‘clear influence’ on Hirst, and other critics have noted the conspicuous similarity in their uses of live flies.” Hirst has previously likened himself to a cultural magpie, as Johnson noted: “He told Peter Blake [in a 2018 interview]: ‘all my ideas are stolen anyway’, a practice he attributes to following Michael Craig-Martin’s dictum ‘Don’t borrow ideas, steal them’, which Hirst claims to have been taught at Goldsmiths.”
Hirst became associated with the emerging Young British Artist (YBA) movement alongside the likes of Mat Collishaw and Angela Bulloch. Yet, Butt, a year below the group was not invited to participate in Freeze, the defining exhibition of that era, curated by Hirst and held in industrial docklands. He continued to use the themes launched in his artwork with flies, producing bio art including The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living, a 14ft tiger shark preserved in formaldehyde.
In 2023, the artist declined to be interviewed by The Guardian for a feature about Butt’s legacy and their respective influences. Comparing the works, Johnson noted that Butt’s iteration has been appreciated for its subtlety in contrast to Hirst’s more attention-grabbing piece: “Hirst’s piece is more sensational and arguably lacks the precise political contexts of Butt’s earlier work,” he said.
The Independent has contacted representatives for Hirst for comment.
The piece has been reconstructed for the Apprehensions exhibition with fly pupae inserted into a compost heap, which hatch into flies feeding upon sugar paper printed with text. They lay eggs and then die in “an endless cycle of information being literally eaten, digested and passed on”, as the artist once explained in a home video.
Hirst unveiled two exhibitions the same year that Butt launched Fly-Piece, with Modern Medicine in March and Gambler in July. Swiss curator Hans Ulrich Obrist has reported A Thousand Years was included at the latter event, which was later than Butt’s degree show. The artist’s representatives told the publication that the piece may also have appeared in the earlier exhibition, before Butt’s show. However, this would still appear to be later than the development of Butt’s prototype the year before, while the two were still students together at Goldsmiths.
Butt’s work has enjoyed a reappraisal in recent years with Tate Britain including Transmission, which originally consisted of Fly-Piece, during the gallery’s rehang two years ago. He struggled with complex challenges including being a gay Muslim man in the 1980s and familial pressure from parents who tore down his work in attempts to have him study science instead.
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It is not the first time the artist has been accused of stealing, having faced at least 16 documented claims of plagiarism in the past. Over the years he has settled with at least three artists for undisclosed sums after they accused him of duplicating their work.
