Artist Damien Hirst will burn thousands of paintings in NFT experiment | Smart news

What is more valuable – a painting or an NFT?

Last summer, Damien Hirst paired thousands of unique dot paintings with corresponding NFTs, or non-fungible tokens, which he put up for sale for just $2,000 each. The catch? By the summer of 2022, the owner must choose whether he wants to keep the NFT or exchange it for the physical canvas copy. The version not selected will be destroyed.

Now, with 10,000 units sold, the results are in. A majority of buyers, 5,149, chose to keep their physical art, while 4,851 chose NFT. Hirst’s project, called “The Currency,” has reached its final phase: The real pieces that buyers rejected in favor of equivalent NFTs will be burned one by one this fall, reports GuardianHarriet Sherwood.

The experiment “explores the boundaries of art and currency – when art changes and becomes a currency, and when currency becomes art,” HENI, the art technology company that ran the sale last summer, writes on its website.

An evocative multimedia artist who gained fame for his large-scale pieces made from pickled dead animals, Hirst says he is fascinated by the world of NFT. NFTs are digital files (music, memes, drawings, and more) that are “certified” using blockchain technology. Most of the hype surrounding NFTs right now involves digital art, which Guardianwrote Mitchell Clark in June.

Holding on to 1,000 of the NFTs, Hirst faced the same choice as the buyers: Would he trade them in and save his physical artworks from destruction?

“In the end I decided to keep all my 1000 currency as NFTs, otherwise it wouldn’t continue to be a real adventure for me,” he says on Twitter. “I decided I had to show my 100 percent support and trust in the NFT world (even if it means destroying the equivalent of 1,000 physical works of art). Eeeek!”

Hirst first began painting spots in the late 1980s, and he showed a collection of spot paintings at an exhibition held simultaneously in galleries around the world in 2012. Themes in his work – which can also take the form of installations, sculptures and drawings – include death, religion, fear, beauty, science and the human condition. In addition to his penchant for shock and spectacle, Hirst has described a fascination with patterns.

“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 couples. A unique thing is a rather frightening object,” Hirst once said, according to the Gagosian Gallery.

Hirst created this series of signed spot paintings in 2016. Each has its own title and slight variations in colour. Each also has its own microdot, reports Caroline Goldstein for Artnet. Microdots, widely used during World War II, are small text or images shrunk down to about the size of a period that can be read when enlarged.

“The Currency” also uses machine learning to categorize and evaluate its thousands of similar paintings. An algorithm scans each piece and converts colors, drips, textures and paint density, among other factors, into data in an attempt to define what makes each canvas unique. After all, an NFT’s inherent value is in its uniqueness.

NFTs have been the subject of great fascination and speculation in the tech and art worlds, leading to, or perhaps culminating in, a $69 million sale of an NFT at Christie’s. The NFT market has since entered a severe downturn, but as Guardian wrote, many people are willing to wait for it.

As for Hirst, he says he’s impressed with the online community around NFTs, and he’s excited to see where it all goes.

“I still don’t know what I’m doing and I have no idea what the future holds, whether NFTs or physical entities are going to become more valuable or less,” Hirst writes on Twitter. “But it’s art! [T]he is funny, part of the journey and perhaps the point of the whole project. Even after a year, I feel like the journey has only just begun.”

Paintings from “The Currency” will be displayed at the Newport Street Gallery on September 9, after which one will be set on fire each day.