Damien Hirst’s NFT project, which compares the value of digital and real art, is known as “The Currency.”
Damien Hirst broadcasts the burning of $10 million in artwork for the NFT initiative.
As part of his nonfungible token (NFT) initiative “The Currency,” Britain’s richest living artist, Damien Hirst, has begun putting millions of dollars’ worth of his own pieces of art on fire.
Hirst destroyed hundreds of his own paintings from The Currency during a webcast of his London gallery on October 11 at 12:30 p.m. local time, guaranteeing that they will only ever exist as an NFT going forward.
The Currency, a collection of 10,000 NFTs each linked to an actual oil painting, is the moniker given to Hirst’s debut NFT release from last year.
The project is a component of Hirst’s societal experiment, which compares the value of strictly digital and real art.
One year was provided to collectors who had purchased one of the $2,000 floor-priced NFTs to determine whether they wanted to keep the NFT or exchange it for the actual painting.
The choice was finalized in July, with 4,851 paintings remaining exclusively in digital form and 5,149 paintings being distributed as tangible works of art.
According to a BBC story, when asked how it felt to burn the artwork, Hirst responded, “It feels amazing, better than I thought.”
The Newport Street Gallery will keep burning the remaining oil paintings until The Currency’s Sept. 30 closing.
From Instagram
The day before the fire, Hirst remarked, “A lot of people assume I’m destroying millions of dollars’ worth of art, but I’m not; I’m finishing the metamorphosis of these physical artworks into NFTs by burning the physical copies.”
“Art, whether it be digital or tangible, has a value that is difficult to describe even in good times, but it won’t be lost; it will be transferred to the NFT as soon as they are burned.”
The floor price for Hirst’s The Currency collection on NFT marketplace OpenSea is 5.1 ether, which is currently worth $6554 at the time of writing. The most recent artwork to be auctioned, “V-Day of consent,” brought in 5.08 ETH.