Artists Gang Up on Damien Hirst for Being a Greedy Bully

By Steve Delahoyde on February 20, 2009 9:01 AM

Back in mid-December, we reported on artist Damien Hirst‘s fight with a sixteen year old artist named Cartrain for liberally borrowing an image of his famous multi-million dollar diamond skull (entitled For the Love of God) to use in a collage. The young artist backed down and handed over to Hirst the couple hundred bucks he’d made off the sale of the piece, much to the disgust of people like the Telegraph‘s Victoria Holman. In further response to all of this, a group of artists in the UK, including KLF member Jimmy Cauty and famed designer Jamie Reid, have banded together to both raise money to pay Cartrain back for his losses and to poke fun at Hirst and share copyright information. What’s more, they’re daring Hirst to try anything legal with them:

“Unlike Cartrain and his gallery, we are not intimidated by lawyers, and if an injunction is issued, we will simply ignore it on the grounds of freedom of speech,” Cauty wrote to the Independent.

The prints, grouped under the title For the Love of Disruptive Strategies and Utopian Visions in Contemporary Art and Culture, include various depictions of the infamous skull. One of them shows a man with the skull for his head reading a book titled A Guide to Copyright and Intellectual Property Law.

All of this is hot off the heels of Spanish artist Eugenio Merino‘s book he released showing a sculpture of Hirst shooting himself in the head, with the title For the Love of Gold, and the author being quoted as having said, “If he killed himself, then the value of his art would increase a lot.”