Damien Hirst, Treasures from the Wreck of the Unbelievable, Claridges

Damien Hirst’s Treasures From the Wreck of the Unbelievable is on display in the opulent lobby of Claridges in Mayfair. Tenyears in the making, the project was first exhibited in Venice’s Punta della Dogana and Palazzo Grassi museums in 2017 and contains hundreds of ‘artefacts’ ‘raised’ from a fictional shipwreck, which supposedly dates back 2,000 years.

The original exhibition presented objects of marble, bronze, gold and jade and included huge statues, some ‘reconstructed’ while others appeared fresh from the seabed and encrusted in coral. Not everyone was privy to the exact nature of the works at first, such was the thoroughness of Hirst’s reconstructed past, which came complete with ancient currencies and documentary footage of the underwater ‘excavations'. And, at a cursory glance, the whole thing might seem like a real, if unlikely, discovery.

Hirst, in fact, went to extraordinary lengths to produce a fake world for our era of fake news, questioning our relationship with history and parodying the art market today. There are plenty of references to pop culture and renaissance masterpieces, if you look closely enough, all brilliantly mixed up in the form of heroic statues and pots. It is, of course, impossible to fit two museums' worth of works into the lobby of Claridges, but a selection has found a temporary – and appropriate home – here until 8 November.