Artists declare war on ‘bully’ Damien Hirst

Damien Hirst, who reportedly made more than £100m from the sale of his works at Sotheby's last year, is being taken on by a group of fellow artists, among them Jamie Reid, best known for his work with The Sex Pistols, in a copyright battle that is likely to turn very nasty indeed.

The move comes in reaction to Hirst's threat in December last year to sue a 16-year-old who used an image of his famous (but as yet unsold) diamond-encrusted skull, For the Love of God, to create a collage to sell on the internet. Hirst, who although he steals freely from other artists and has been the subject of a number of similar actions himself, reported the teenager, who styles himself Cartrain, to the Design and Artists Copyright Society, which ordered him to hand over his meagre £200 profit to Hirst.

Now a collective that includes Reid and Jimmy Cauty, a former member of KLF, the pop band who once burned £1m as an art statement, are seeking revenge on the teenager's behalf by producing a series of skull images which flout Hirst's copyright. They appear on a specially-created website, redragtoabull.com.

Writing to the Independent, Cauty said: "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." Meanwhile, Reid (one of whose artworks, God Save Damien Hirst, is pictured above) calls Hirst a "hypocritical and greedy art bully", adding, in reference to his reputed £500m fortune: "Hasn't he got enough?"

One of the limited edition images, sold under the title For the Love of Disruptive Strategies and Utopian Visions in Contemporary Art and Culture, has been designed by Reid as a deliberate variation on his Sex Pistols work. There is also an image of a man whose face is superimposed with Hirst's skull reading a book entitled Copyright and Intellectual Property Law.

Another image pretends to be the work of Hirst's fellow YBAs, the Chapman Brothers. It bears a graffiti-ed skull image and the words: "We Always Knew You were a Cunt!"