Hirst has replaced the name of the drug with the name of a food traditional to working class British café culture, for example 'corned beef' and 'sausages', transforming the food into a brand by the addition of the insignia ®, TM or decorative typescript.
Such variations on the artist's name as Hirst, HirstDamien, Damien, Damien & Hirst, Hirst Products Limited, also set in a range of typescripts, have taken the place of the usual drug manufacturer's logo.
Hirst has compared medical packaging to the formats of minimalism, saying:
'a lot of the actual boxes of medicines are all very minimal and could be taken directly from minimalism, in the way that … minimalism implies confidence.'
For Hirst medicine, like religion and art, provides a belief system which is both seductive and illusory.
He has said:
'I can't understand why some people believe completely in medicine and not in art, without questioning either'
The Last Supper refers to the way in which medicinal drugs are becoming a regular part of everyday life, as common as the food Hirst has chosen to represent. Like pharmaceuticals, the side effects of which are not always pleasant or harmless, these common British foods often contain an unappetising and potentially dangerous cocktail of drugs, including whatever chemicals the industrially farmed animals have been fed, and notoriously large amounts of heart disease-inducing saturated fat.
Medicines, prescribed by doctors to alleviate and cure illness, are commodities manufactured and sold by large corporations. Like the Brillo boxes, Coke bottles and Campbell's Soup packaging imitated by American artist Andy Warhol (1928-87) in the 1960s, Hirst's version of The Last Supper refers to the everyday dependence on reliable panaceas which medical and fast food industries feed off (Warhol also submitted this subject to the manufacturing process of screenprinting).
Hirst has commented,
'I like the idea of an artist as a scientist. A painter as a machine. The packages in The Last Supper and in the medicine cabinets are … trying to sell the product … in a very clinical way. Which starts to become very funny.'
All of Hirst's thirteen components in his version of The Last Supper are potential betrayers, providing a humorously cynical comment on self-destructive aspects of British society.
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