I Leaked Damien Hirst’s Secret Inventory

Ben Lewis on the art market, the Salvator Mundi, and why the most beautiful objects are used for the ugliest purposes.

In 2005, a painting sold at auction for $1,000. In 2017, the same painting sold to the ruler of Saudi Arabia for $450 million. Christie's marketed it as a Leonardo da Vinci. It probably isn't. Nobody can prove it either way because most of the original surface is gone. That is not why it sold for $450 million.

Ben Lewis is an art historian and investigative journalist who has spent his career reading the art market like a forensic investigator. What he found is a largely unregulated parallel financial system in which narrative manufactures value, forgers get hired as restorers, and the mechanics that made Damien Hirst worth hundreds of millions are the same mechanics that gave us crypto, NFTs, and meme stocks.