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Oct 29, 2023

Damien Hirst burns £10 million of his artwork in extravagant display

By Natasha Leake Which is more valuable, an NFT or a painting? This was the

By Natasha Leake

Which is more valuable, an NFT or a painting?

This was the question Damien Hirst posed to buyers last summer, as he put his artwork up for sale for £2000 each. In a project is called The Currency, Hirst matched his unique dot paintings with corresponding NFTs. The catch? The owner would have to choose by the summer of 2022 whether they wanted to keep the NFT, or trade it for the original canvas. The piece of artwork not selected would be destroyed.

Now, with 10,000 pieces of artwork sold, Hirst is due to set light today to artworks from his first NFT collection worth £10m in front of a virtual audience and invited guests at his Newport Street Gallery for Frieze London. The burning routine will continue daily at specified times until his exhibition closes at the end of this month. The works were made on paper by hand in 2016 with enamel paint, then numbered, watermarked, hologrammed and micro-dotted, as well as stamped and randomly titled from Hirst's favourite song lyrics, before being signed on the back.

Artist Damien Hirst poses in front of his artwork entitled 'I am Become Death, Shatterer of Worlds' in the Tate Modern art gallery

By Natasha Leake

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By Rebecca Cope

Whilst a majority of buyers, 5,149, chose to keep their physical art, 4,851 opted to keep the NFTs. Hirst himself also held onto 1,000 of the NFTs, and he faced the same choice as his buyers: Would he trade them in and save his physical artworks from destruction? ‘In the end I decided I have to keep all my 1000 currency as NFTs otherwise it wouldn't carry on being a proper adventure for me,’ the artist said on Twitter. ‘I decided I need to show my 100 percent support and confidence in the NFT world (even though it means I will have to destroy the corresponding 1000 physical artworks). Eeeeeek!’

The Currency website explains that it seeks to ‘explores the boundaries of art and currency—when art changes and becomes a currency, and when currency becomes art. The exhibition also uses machine learning to categorize and evaluate its thousands of similar paintings. An algorithm scans each piece and converts colours, drips, textures and paint density, among other factors, into data, in an attempt to define what makes each canvas unique.

Visitors walk past ovens which will be used to burn some artworks during a photocall of "The Currency" NFT collection

By Natasha Leake

By Stephanie Bridger-Linning

By Rebecca Cope

‘People are afraid of change, so you create a kind of belief for them through repetition. It's like breathing. I’ve always been drawn to series and pairs. A unique thing is quite a frightening object,’ Hirst once said, per the Gagosian Gallery.

For Laura Cumming, the author and Observer art critic, this ostensibly provocative act is entirely in keeping with the artist's practice. ‘Damien Hirst made the market his medium and his message long ago,’ she said this weekend. ‘His latest stunt is absolutely self-contained in those terms. He was always brilliant at titles and this one is like the concentrated crack-cocaine of epigrams. It is called The Currency and that is what it is about, and what it is for – art as money, and the making of money with art. And that, in turn, goes right to the heart of Frieze week.’

Damien Hirst

This display comes as more artists start to incinerate their artwork: Banksy surprised an auction room in 2018 by shredding his image Girl With Balloon, whilst more recently, cryptocurrency entrepreneur Martin Mobarak personally incinerated a Frida Kahlo drawing in a bid to ‘permanently transition it into the Metaverse’