Damien Hirst

Damien Hirst, Designer - Dot Boot - 2002 - Manufacturer: Manolo Blahnik (British, born Spain, 1942) - a,b) cotton, leather - Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (click photo for larger image)Damien Hirst (born 1965) is a British artist, entrepreneur, and art collector. He is the most prominent member of the group known as the Young British Artists (or YBAs), who dominated the art scene in the UK during the 1990s. 

Working as an assemblagist, painter, and conceptual artist, Hirst’s deliberately provocative work addresses vanity and beauty, death and rebirth, and medicine, technology, and mortality. Considered an enfant terrible of the 1990s art world, Hirst presented dead animals in formaldehyde as art. Like the French Dada artist Marcel Duchamp, Hirst employed ready-made objects to shocking effect, and in the process he questioned the very nature of art. He has also made "spin paintings," created on a spinning circular surface, and "spot paintings", which are rows of randomly colored circles created by his assistants.

In 1995 Hirst won Tate Britain’s Turner Prize, Great Britain’s premier award for contemporary art. In September 2008, he took an unprecedented move for a living artist, by selling a complete show, Beautiful Inside My Head Forever, at Sotheby’s by auction and bypassing his long-standing galleries. The auction exceeded all predictions, raising £111 million ($198 million), breaking the record for a one-artist auction as well as Hirst's own record. In several instances since 1999, Hirst's works have been challenged and contested as plagiarized, both in written articles by journalists and artists, and, in one instance, through legal proceedings which led to an out-of-court settlement.

No matter what, you can always count on Hirst to be controversial.