Hirst’s NFT project, which looks at the value of digital art vs. physical art, is called “The Currency.”
Damien Hirst, the richest living artist in Britain, has begun burning millions of dollars’ worth of his own pieces of art on fire as part of his nonfungible token (NFT) initiative named “The Currency.”
Hirst set fire to hundreds of his own “The Currency” pieces during a live feed of his London gallery on October 11 at 12:30 p.m. local time, ensuring that they would only ever exist as an NFT going forward.
Hirst’s inaugural NFT collection, which debuted last year and consisted of 10,000 NFTs each linked to an actual oil painting, was dubbed “The Currency.”
Hirst has been using the project as part of a social experiment to compare the value of digital art and physical art.
Collectors who bought one of the NFTs with a minimum price of $2,000 had a year to decide if they wanted to keep the NFT or trade it in for the real painting.
The deadline for making a decision was in July. Of the paintings, 5,149 were to be delivered as physical works of art, and 4,851 were to only exist in digital form.
When asked how it made him feel to burn the art, Hirst told , “It feels good, better than I expected.”
At the Newport Street Gallery, the remaining oil paintings will continue to be burned until the show The Currency ends on September 30.
“A lot of people think I’m burning millions of dollars of art but I’m not, I’m completing the transformation of these physical artworks into NFTs by burning the physical versions,” said Hirst the day before the burn event.
“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.”
The Currency collection by Hirst is for sale on the NFT marketplace OpenSea, with a floor price of 5.1 Ether (ETH), which was worth $6,539 at the time this article was written. V-Day of Consent, the most recent piece to sell, sold for 5.08 ETH.
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