Damien Hirst’s Bonfire of the NFTs
If you’ve ever been cornered at a party by an NFT bro, you know how that feels. Deep boredom when he shows you the last aesthetically gloomy “drops” on the phone screen. Amazing that someone would spend their money on what basically amounts to (legally dubious) bragging rights over an infinitely copyable, infinitely shareable jpeg. Irritation bordering on despair at his inability to acknowledge blockchain technology’s woeful environmental impact. Suspicion that the trade in this “digital asset class” is nothing more than a bubble. Most of all, a desperate desire to escape. Much like this was my experience of Damien Hirst’s exhibition ‘The Currency’, staged at the artist’s own Newport Street Gallery in London, which saw him enter, with crushing inevitability, what more adventurous souls call the ‘NFT Room’.
Let’s get the details of the project over. In 2016, Hirst created 10,000 of his signature dot paintings on sheets of 20 x 30 cm handmade paper, signing each unique work and franking it with a hologram of his face, as if it were a note issued from his own personal coinage. For each of these paintings, the artist also created a corresponding NFT (short description: more dots, this time in motion), which he put up for sale in 2021 via lottery for USD 2,000 a pop. Buyers then had a year or so to decide whether to keep their non-fungible token or exchange it for its paper counterpart. At the end of this period, the rejected artwork would be destroyed, either with the click of a mouse or, more dramatically, in one of six minimalist incinerators set into the walls of the Newport Street Gallery.
In the end, 4,851 NFTs were retained (1,000 by Hirst himself, in what he has presented as a vote of confidence in the medium, or at least the market) while 5,149 buyers chose the paintings. Did this constitute a poll on the perceived future value of a physical work by this most famous of British artists versus an entry in a digital ledger? Only if we assume that everyone who ponied up two thousand saw their purchase primarily as a store of wealth, an asset to appreciate, rather than, say, something to bring them joy or comfort, can make them to think or feel.
On Newport Street, the rejected paintings, plus grayscale facsimiles of those not slated for burning, were organized into huge grids and hung from the ceiling in clear plastic cases. These looked appealing enough, although the impact of Hirst’s already well-known dot motif was further diminished by the appearance of the inspectors’ T-shirts and the souvenirs on sale in the gallery’s shop. On the day of the visit, the artist, dressed in silver flame-retardant yarn pants and matching gloves, burned the first batch of paintings, pushing work after work into the incinerators’ roaring heat. Perhaps this should trigger the thoughts of John Baldessaris Cremation project (1970), in which the American conceptualist set fire to every canvas he had painted over the past 13 years, or Bill Drummond and Jimmy Cauty of the KLF setting fire to £1,000,000 in cash on the Scottish Isle of Jura (K Foundation Burn a million pounds, 1994). Instead, I was reminded of a suburban boomer dad drifting distractedly at a barbecue, trying to figure out if he still had enough in his pension pot to retire early.
If Hirst’s best work – his bleak, fly-blown vivarium thousand years (1990), for example – is about death, then his worst is about money. Baldessari followed Cremation project with a piece entitled I don’t want to make more boring art (1971). It is a resolution that Hirst, once such an exciting artist, might do well to adopt.
Damien Hirst’s ‘The Currency’ is Newport Street Gallery, London, until 30 October.
Main image: Damien Hirst, 8483. Can I stay like this? (details), 2021. Courtesy: © Damien Hirst and Science Ltd. All rights reserved, DACS 2022; photograph: Prudence Cuming Associates Ltd.
