Damien Hirst

Damien Hirst (born 1965 in Bristol) led the Young British Artists to global notoriety with a shark in formaldehyde and a diamond-encrusted skull, and remains reportedly the world’s wealthiest artist. His career-long theme — outsourcing execution to assistants, factories, and chance — made him an unusually natural early adopter of generative algorithms.

The Beautiful Paintings

In March 2023 Hirst launched The Beautiful Paintings with the art-tech platform HENI: collectors configured their own versions of his signature Spin Paintings — choosing style, palette, format, and title — and a machine-learning-driven generative algorithm, developed with HENI’s data science team over more than a year, produced the works as prints or NFTs. In a nine-day sale the project moved 5,508 works for $20.9 million, with Hirst declaring the results had “blown my mind.”

Critics called it a merchandising operation more than a studio practice — a familiar charge against Hirst, whose market experiments (including his 2021 NFT project The Currency, where buyers chose between a physical work and its token) have always doubled as provocations about value. But the project made him one of the most commercially successful blue-chip artists to hand aesthetic control to an algorithm, extending the spin machine’s randomness — a device he has used since 1994 — into software.