After 5 p.m. I start drinking and things at Money Stuff deteriorate quickly. https://t.co/GCEoC3bVHn
— Matt Levine (@matt_levine) October 11, 2022
There are critics who aver that Damien Hirst’s career has been less about creating than about performing. He has, for many years, admitted that most of “his” work was actually done by his ‘assistants’:
Hirst once said he didn’t paint his own spot paintings because, “I couldn’t be f***ing arsed doing it,” according to The Guardian.
Given that pedigree, perhaps the latest Hirst performance was predictable. Per Matt Levine, at Bloomberg:
I guess you have three options:
1- Pay Damien Hirst £2,000 and get one of his dot paintings;
2- Pay Damien Hirst £2,000 and not get one of his dot paintings; or
3- Don’t pay Damien Hirst £2,000 at all.I know what I would choose (what I have chosen), but the market seems pretty evenly divided between Options 1 and 2:
[Yes, readers: Hirst has publicly torched a bunch of dotworks, live at the Turner Gallery.]The British artist and art collector created 10,000 unique dot paintings in 2016 which corresponded with a collection of 10,000 NFTs, a unique digital token that can be traded online.
In “The Currency”, Hirst’s first NFT collection, he gave his buyers the choice to exchange their NFT version – worth £2,000 – for the physical artwork…
Hirst, reportedly the UK’s wealthiest living artist, pledged to destroy all the original artworks that people decided not to exchange their virtual token for.
As a result, he will torch thousands of paintings – collectively worth almost £10 million – starting on Tuesday afternoon at the Newport Street Gallery in London.
Late Night Open Thread: NFTs Are for Setting Money on Fire, HirstWorks EditionPost + Comments (42)