You have to wonder what part of the term intellectual property British artist Damian Hirst doesn't understand. Since 1999, charges of plagiarism have piled up against him, and to such an extent that in 2014, the BBC's prime time "The One Show" saw fit to tally all the charges to date.

Inside out

But that was then and this is now. Hirst's current exhibit example in England's Yorkshire Sculpture Park he calls Hymn - a 20-foot tall painted bronze sculpture of a male torso with a cross-section of his internal organs laid bare - also comes with a complaint of copying.

The Guardian reports that Hirst breached a copyright belonging to toy manufacturer Humbro Limited that sells a 10-inch plastic anatomical doll of a male torso with inner organs revealed. "Hymn" looks just like it. Hirst explained that he was "inspired" by the doll. "Inspired?" Norman Emms, the commercial sculptor who designed the doll said of sculpture, "It is an exact copy, completely and utterly exact - even the hair, the eyebrows."

A variation

But wait, another of Hirst's sculptures he calls The Virgin Mother, though a clear take-off of Hymn, has its own look. At a monumental 33-foot height, it depicts a whole female figure with half of her swollen belly-baring a fetus within.

Art historian Rudi Fuchs, directors of museums in The Hague and Amsterdam, likens The Virgin Mother to "an ancient god in the apse of a temple."

Duplicating Degas

But to me, there's nothing godlike about it. Instead, Hirst seems to have taken a page from the playbook of Chris Ofili, infamous for his elephant-dung-decorated painting Virgin Mary.

Just as Olifi brought a heavenly figure down to earth with evidence of a bodily function, Hirst pictures a pregnant Mary with her womb exposed, giving the appearance of a medical textbook illustration. in fact, Hirst seems perversely fixated on the subject of maternity given his earlier macabre work Mother and Child Divided in which he showed an actual cow and her calf bisected floating in a tank of formaldehyde.

Bad joke

My objections to The Virgin Mother aside, Artlyst Magazine sees in the stance of the sculpture that of Degas' Little Dancer of Fourteen Years. Hirst acknowledges the allusion to Degas' sculpture. He said that making the female pregnant is "kind of naughty; she shouldn't really be pregnant," (referring to the 14-year-old). I wanted a feeling of that." Apparently, Hirst likes to be naughty in his work. He titled the male torso Hymn, a word defined as a religious song, as a pun on the masculine pronoun.

Taking pills

But as with his rip-off of a toy company's doll, Hirst seems comfortable with exact copying. In 2016, he was sued by Colleen Wolstenholme, a jewelry designer from Canada because he imitated her charm bracelet made up of pill shapes.

The Fashion Law made the case that he "willfully and wrongfully copying, creating, manufacturing, and/or selling the bracelets on an ongoing basis."

Isn't there's something Trumpian about this guy? He does outrageous things and when called on them, keeps at it.
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