In 2010, Damien Hirst donated one of his paintings to fellow British artist Michael Landy for his “Art Bin” project. Landy had asked artist friends to submit works they weren’t happy with, to be scrapped, collected in a Plexiglas container at the South London Gallery, and reunited in a “monument to creative failure”. Michael Landy felt a little sorry for the image of the skull that Hirst handed over to the trash can without any discernible pain of separation: “I thought it was pretty nice,” he said at the time.
The art critic doyen Robert Hughes, on the other hand, said shortly before his death about Damien Hirst that it borders on a miracle “what so much money and so little talent can produce together”. But anyone who approaches Damien Hirst’s art with categories such as beauty, failure or talent has not really grasped its actual meaning. Damien Hirst is a genius at the art monetization game, alongside Jeff Koons perhaps the greatest master of marketing and self-promotion since Andy Warhol.
So it was only a matter of time before he not only took matters into his own hands to destroy his works, which Landy still considered a conceptual gesture, but also made it an integral part of an investment program: next fall, Damien Hirst burned thousands of his paintings at his Newport Street Gallery in London as the conclusion and culmination of a year-long NFT project succinctly titled “The Currency.” After that, they will only exist virtually.
An artificial fire is lit every day
Last year, Hirst launched “The Currency” online on the so-called “Palm” platform. Palm is an allegedly particularly energy-efficient blockchain, i.e. a decentralized database on which all 10,000 real paintings from the Hirst project have been linked with so-called non-fungible tokens (NFTs). In short, this process provided them with a non-exchangeable digital signature, making them unique and non-copyable, at least within the blockchain. For a year they existed both physically and digitally.
Buyers of the NFTs (priced at $2,000 each) could choose to keep them in digital form or trade them in for the physical work on paper. All those works whose buyers opted for the NFT – about half – will be exhibited once at Hirst’s London gallery from September 9th and then burned. They will then only exist on the blockchain. An artificial fire is lit daily; it all culminating in a closing event during London’s Frieze art fair in October, where Hirst will commit the remaining paintings to the flames.
Just as fascinating as the spectacular pyre made up of thousands of images is the market development that the project reflects: Since the crash of the cryptocurrencies, the “currency” NFTs on the secondary market have also lost value rapidly. According to Heni Analytics, a company that evaluates art market data and analyzes value developments, between July 30 and August 31, 2021, there were just over 2,000 sales of “Currency” works with a total value of $47.9 million. In June 2022, around 1.4 million dollars were sold with only 170 sales. The resale value of the physical works seems to be more stable. In January, for example, one of the original paintings was sold in London for a good 22,000 dollars.
It’s this data that defines “The Currency” far more than the dotted images, whether you’re looking at them on your smartphone or hanging them on the wall. They don’t lose their importance if instead one warms oneself on the embers of their smoking remains. Hirst has called the project his “most exciting by far” because, as quoted, it is The Art Newspaper him to “the idea of art as a storehouse of wealth”. Viewed in this way, “Currency” is a monument of art as currency, and thus the apotheosis of Hirst’s art par excellence.