Art by Damien Hirst

Hirst became the face of the Young British Artists movement almost overnight in 1991 with The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living, a 14-foot tiger shark suspended in a tank of formaldehyde, commissioned by collector Charles Saatchi, that turned "how much is this actually worth" into a running public argument that's followed Hirst's career ever since. The shark has since had to be replaced (the original started visibly decomposing), which somehow only added to the point.

He's built a genuinely industrial-scale studio practice: spot paintings and spin paintings produced largely by assistants working from his instructions, in the hundreds and thousands, alongside one-off, deliberately excessive objects like For the Love of God, a platinum human skull encrusted with 8,601 diamonds and priced at £50 million on completion. In 2021 he launched The Currency, 10,000 NFTs each tied to a unique physical painting, and told buyers to choose one or the other. The physical version was destroyed by fire for anyone who kept the NFT instead. Most people, it turned out, kept the NFT.

More recently he's talked openly about a project called, half-jokingly, Year One after Damien Dies: new work designed and planned now but intended for release only after his death, which is either a very Hirst joke about mortality and market value or a completely sincere one, probably both.