A U.K. artist burned 1,000 pieces of artwork on Tuesday, giving the buyers nonfungible token replicas.
Damien Hirst livestreamed the burn of his “The Currency” collection on Instagram. He originally sold 10,000 pieces at $2,000 a piece, giving his buyers the option to keep the physical artwork or opt for an NFT copy, which would be the sole digital version. Five thousand, one hundred, and forty-nine chose to keep the original painting, and 4,851 chose the NFT, according to a press release.
“A lot of people think I’m burning millions of dollars of art but I’m not,” Hirst explained in an Instagram caption. “I’m completing the transformation of these physical artworks into nfts by burning the physical versions, the value of art digital or physical which is hard to define at the best of times will not be lost it will be transferred to the nft as soon as they are burnt.”
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Hirst will continue to burn the remaining 3,800 pieces, while the entire collection is on display at London’s Newport Street Gallery through Oct. 30. The pieces went on sale in July 2021, with buyers making their choice by that following July.
“The physical artworks were created by hand in 2016 using enamel paint on handmade paper,” the press release explains. “Each artwork is numbered, titled, stamped, and signed by the artist on the back. Additional authenticity features on the artwork paper include a watermark, a microdot and a hologram containing a portrait of the artist. On each artwork, no colour is repeated twice. The titles were generated through the application of machine learning to some of the artist’s favourite song lyrics.”
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“The Currency” is Hirst’s first NFT collection.
