Damien Hirst’s NFT experiment ends: How many buyers chose digital tokens over physical artwork?

Damien Hirst is interested in NFTs. Some will consider this a reflection on the artist, and others as a reflection on the technology. Whether you take these reflections to be positive or negative reveals something about your own concept of how the art world, the business world, and the digital world intersect. So will your reaction to The currency, Hirst’s just completed art project and technological experiment. Launched last July, it produced 10,000 unique non-fungible tokens “each of which was associated with a corresponding artwork the British artist created in 2016,” as Artnet’s Caroline Goldstein writes. “The digital tokens were sold via a lottery system for $2,000.”

Hirst also imposed an unprecedented condition: he announced “that his collectors would have to choose between the physical artwork and its digital version, setting a one-year deadline—in effect, asking them to vote for whichever was of more lasting value.” For each buyer who selects the original work, Hirst will assign his NFT to an inaccessible address, the closest to destroying it. And for every buyer who chooses NFT, Hirst would throw the paper version on a bonfire. The final numbers, which Hirst tweeted at the end of last month, came to “5,149 physical and 4,851 NFTs (meaning I have to burn 4,851 equivalent physical tenders).” Hirst also kept 1,000 copies for himself.

“In the beginning I thought I would definitely choose everything physically,” explains Hirst. “Then I thought half and then I felt I had to keep all my 1000 as NFTs and then all the paper again and round and round I have gone, my head in a spin.” Eventually, he went all-digital, having decided that “I must show my 100 percent support and trust in the NFT world (even if it means destroying the equivalent 1,000 physical works of art).” Perhaps this was a victory for Hirst’s neophilia, but then those instincts have served him well before: few living artists have managed to attract such public fascination, enamored or hostile, for so many consecutive years – let alone such formidable sales prices, and not only for his stuffed shark.

“I’ve never really understood money,” Hirst tells Stephen Fry in the video above. (You can watch an extended version of their conversation here.) “All these things — art, money, commerce — they’re all ethereal,” ultimately based on nothing more than “faith and trust.” Returning to the techniques of his early “spot paintings” – the ones he made himself before outsourcing the task to assistants with smoother hands – and stamping the results into unique digital objects for sale was perhaps an attempt to wrap his head around the even less intuitive . the concept of NFT. All told, The currency brought in about $89 million in revenue. More telling will be the price of the tokens on the secondary market, where they are currently changing hands for around $7,000: a price that is impossible to evaluate correctly for now, and thus not without the intriguing ambiguity of certain modern works of art.

via Artnet

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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts about cities, language and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books about cities, the book The Stateless City: A Walk Through 21st Century Los Angeles and the video series The city at the cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshallon Facebook or on Instagram.