Damien Hirst burned artworks worth $10M for an NFT project, The Currency

SNEAK PEEK

  • Damien Hirst, the millionaire artist has burned thousands of paintings for ‘The Currency,’ a special NFT project.
  • The remaining paintings will be burned at the Newport Street Gallery.
  • The floor price of each NFT when it was sold initially was $2,000.

Damien Hirst is putting his artworks on fire and mind it, they are worth millions of dollars. He is doing this as part of ‘The Currency,’ his NFT project. 

On October 11, during a live stream of Hirst’s London gallery, the artist burned not one or two but hundreds of his very own ‘The Currency’ artworks and made sure that they remain exclusively as a non-fungible token moving forward. 

‘The Currency’ is his first NFT collection and was dropped in 2021. The collection includes 10,000 NFTs with each one of them tied to a real oil painting. To safeguard the work, each painting has anti-counterfeiting techniques like holographic images of the artist and watermarks.

The project belongs to Hirst’s social experiment aimed at testing the value of completely digital art against physical art. 

Those who purchased the NFTs had a time of one year to decide whether to keep the NFT or trade it in exchange for a physical painting. 

The deadline ended in July and 5,149 paintings were delivered as real pieces of art; whereas, 4,851 paintings now exist in digital form only. 

On being asked about how he is feeling after burning the artwork, Hirst replied that it felt good and even better than his expectations. 

A day before burning the artworks, Hirst said that many people think he is burning art worth millions of dollars, which he is not, as he is converting them into NFTs by burning their physical forms. 

Additionally he said:

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 is available on OpenSea and has a floor price of 5.1 ETH. V-Day, the recent piece to be sold, had a floor price of 5.08 ETH.