Artists burn their work for NFTs
The intersection between art and NFT is getting weirder and weirder. Painter Damien Hirst has joined other artists in burning 1,000 of his pieces this week, all in the name of non-fungible tokens.
Hirst posted the burning of artwork from his “The Currency” project on Instagram, saying that they will live on as NFTs and that the value of the physical works will be transferred to the digitized goods. In accordance NPRHirst gave collectors the choice a year after their purchase of “The Currency” works to get the physical painting or hold onto the NFT and let the painting burn in exchange.
NPR also noticed that the patrons were fairly evenly split in their decisions, with only a few hundred physical chip holders outscoring the NFT holders. The paintings, which were on display at London’s Newport Street Gallery, will be burnt during the Frieze London art fair this week. And yes, people were quick to point out on his post that this has detrimental effects on the environment, compounding the unnecessary burning and tax NFT already has.
Hirst’s blazing display is extreme, even among pro-NFT artists. It also makes the purchase of art, and by extension the assigned value, almost entirely transactional.
The destruction of the original work to ostensibly transfer its “value” to its NFT is an even more difficult issue for artists of other media. What can digital artists and photographers who try a similar move, which is not recommended, do? Do you want to delete the original RAW image? Delete artwork made layer by layer in Procreate or Photoshop? Film the painstaking process of pressing “delete” on all SD cards and cloud copies? The edited and final versions? This, all in the hope that the value transcends the art itself into an unproven digital currency because, to be clear, even if Hirst puts the idea confidently on his Instagram, this is by no means a safe bet.
“Many people think I burn millions of dollars of art, but I don’t, I complete the transformation of these physical works of art into nfts by burning the physical versions, the value of art digital or physical which is difficult to define at the best of times , will not be lost it will be transferred to nft as soon as they are burned and I will live-stream the entire burning here on instagram,” he wrote (missing punctuation and capital letters his own).
Never mind that the NFTs sold for a bargain compared to what his original artwork usually goes for, according to NPR. Hirst himself notes how difficult it is to attribute value to art. Choosing a medium that is rapidly declining doesn’t seem to help matters.
Image credit: Top image licensed via Depositphotos.
