Damien Hirst has just burned 1,000 of his paintings and will soon burn thousands more

by James · October 12, 2022

British artist Damien Hirst is among the many art world giants who have set fire to his work, after burning 1,000 of his artworks on Tuesday. He streamed the event on Instagram and will burn several thousand works of art.

It is part of his project “The Currency”. It consists of a collection of 10,000 NFTs. Each non-fungible token corresponds to a physical painting of his signature multicolored dots, made from enamel paint on handmade paper. The pieces were originally available for $2,000, which is reasonable compared to what Hirst’s work has been known to go for.

“Many people think I burn millions of dollars worth of art, but I don’t, I complete the transformation of these physical artworks into nfts by burning the physical versions,” Hirst wrote in an Instagram caption. “The value of digital or physical art that is difficult to define at best will not be lost, it will be transferred to nft as soon as they are burned.”

View this post on Instagram A post shared by Damien Hirst (@damienhirst)

A year after purchasing a piece from “The Currency,” collectors had to make a choice. They could either take the painting, meaning they would lose the NFT, or keep the NFT, meaning the painting would be burned.

“‘The Currency’ pitted Hirst’s entry into the new world of digital art against his old school practices, asking the art market to decide which was more valuable,” wrote Caroline Goldstein of Artnet News.

Buyers were almost evenly split in their decisions, with 5,149 choosing to exchange their NFT for the original painting and 4,851 choosing the NFT. The works will be displayed at the Newport Street Gallery in London and will be burned during the Frieze London art fair, which runs from 12 to 16 October.

An NFT is a digital identifier that confirms the authenticity and ownership of a tangible or digital object. It acts as a kind of receipt, and its uniqueness makes it valuable.

In the contemporary art market, art is traded as an asset and seen as a financial instrument, filmmaker Nathaniel Kahn told NPR in 2018. NFTs are a new type of asset that can be commoditized. The energy required to make them has also made them notoriously bad for the environment.

Many comments on Hirst’s Instagram post about the burning were critical. “It’s all about the money anyway,” wrote one user. “Interesting strategy to maximize the carbon footprint of this collection,” wrote another.