Bottling the American Dream: The $75,000 Damien Hirst Medicine Cabinet Filled With Eminem’s Life

For two and a half weeks this October, one of London's more talked-about cabinets sits behind glass on Lexington Street. "American Dream," the collaboration between Damien Hirst and Eminem that opened at HENI Gallery in Soho on 2 October and runs through 19 October, is a piece of biographical alchemy. Three limited-edition medicine cabinets, Re-up, Riot and Addict, each carry Eminem's 12-album discography, and around them a suite of spin paintings dissolves those album covers into pure colour. Admission is free and the gallery opens daily from 10am to 6pm at 6-10 Lexington Street, London W1F 0LB.

Twelve Covers for Interscope

The story starts, as many good art-market stories do, with a free gesture. In 2022, to mark the 30th anniversary of Interscope Records, Hirst redesigned 12 of Eminem's album covers, a lineup that included the 8 Mile soundtrack, The Marshall Mathers LP and Music to Be Murdered By. The covers were shown at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art that January, and Hirst produced them for nothing, with profits directed toward building a school in South Los Angeles. Eminem shared the honour with Kendrick Lamar, Dr. Dre, Lady Gaga and Billie Eilish in the same Interscope campaign. Four years later those reimagined covers have returned, now as the spine of a rigorously editioned luxury object.

The cabinets extend a series Hirst has worked since the mid-1980s, when he began naming his medicine cabinets after songs by The Clash and Sex Pistols. "American Dream" makes that musical connection literal. The cabinet now reads as a self-portrait of Marshall Mathers, an artist whose catalogue doubles as one of the longest recovery narratives in popular music. In Addict, the highest-priced of the three at $75,000, the medicine arrayed inside reflects drugs mentioned in Eminem's lyrics, a pharmacopoeia assembled with archival fastidiousness. Riot and Addict arrange album sleeves alongside medicine boxes and pills, preserving the clinical aesthetic of the original cabinets, and the sleeves themselves hold actual vinyl records, so a collector can listen to the artwork as well as look at it.

Signed by Both Artists

The pricing shows where pop heritage meets the secondary market. Re-up, an edition of 100 plus 20 artist's proofs, carries a price of $35,000. Riot, at $50,000, and Addict, at $75,000, are each limited to 50 plus 10 artist's proofs. Every cabinet is hand-signed by Hirst and Eminem on the front and numbered on the label. The paintings, in household gloss on canvas at 121.9 or 213.4 centimetres square, are one-off variations produced through the chance colour interactions of Hirst's spin machinery, so no two are alike in a medium that is part argument with control. All the paintings are hand-signed by both artists on the label. Alongside the originals, HENI Editions is releasing 12 signed prints, UV giclée on aluminium composite at 94.5 by 94.5 centimetres. The release runs on an application-only model, with allocations reviewed individually, Know Your Customer checks, and prices exclusive of VAT, until 17:00 BST on 19 October.

That machinery suits the subject. Eminem arrives as a set of compounding statistics: 164 million albums sold, more than 110 billion streams, 15 Grammy Awards, an Academy Award, the top-selling artist of the 2000s, the artist behind Recovery, the first album in the U.S. to be certified platinum digitally, the first hip-hop artist to have an album spend a cumulative decade on the Billboard 200, and now the only rapper certified platinum in four consecutive decades. Hirst has spent his career turning mortality and consumption into objects people queue to buy. Both share a fluency in excess, and "American Dream" is an artwork about the price of excess, offered at a price that underlines the point.

The cabinet now reads as a self-portrait of Marshall Mathers, an artist whose catalogue doubles as one of the longest recovery narratives in popular music.

The Price of Excess

The title is the barb. An American Dream rendered in prescription boxes and lacquered vinyl is a memento mori for the streaming age, the idea that acquisition can contain a past and that trauma can be editioned, numbered and hung above a fireplace. The most covetable object in the room holds the substances that shaped its owner's story, now offered as décor to collectors who may never unseal a sleeve. The work reads as one of the more honest artefacts the gallery has shown this year, a trophy that remembers what it cost.

American Dream by Damien Hirst and Eminem is at HENI Gallery, 6-10 Lexington Street, London W1F 0LB, from 2 to 19 October 2026. Opening hours are 10am to 6pm daily and admission is free.