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Since Bitcoin was first launched in 2009 by the mysterious person or group known as Satoshi Nakamoto, the question of what exactly constitutes a currency has become a bit blurry. This issue was further complicated by the inception of NFTs, one-of-a-kind digital artworks that have been trading at extravagant values online, with huge auction houses such as Sotheby’s and Christie’s even dipping their feet in. Now, renowned British artist Damien Hirst seeks to further blur the lines between art and money with his new project The Currency, which began on July 14, 2021.
The technology for NFTs (non-fungible tokens) was created for the Ethereum blockchain in 2015, and since then, they’ve been gaining massive amounts of traction with crypto investors. Mike Winkelmann, a digital artist who goes by Beeple, sold one of his NFTs for a mind-boggling $69 million at Christie’s on March 11. A pixelated 8-bit image of a man with spots on his face titled CryptoPunk 7523 was also recently sold at Christie’s for $11.7 million. So, with Damien Hirst being one of the most well-known names in the contemporary art world, his run of NFTs are sure to appreciate in value in dramatic fashion.
But, always looking for the newest way to point out contradictions and grey areas in human society, Damien Hirst is using his latest project as a sort of social experiment, forcing buyers to choose between physical art and NFTs. Will The Currency answer the question of whether digital art is really replacing physical art for good? Will this project completely dismantle the divide between art and currency for good? We’ll all just have to wait and see.
The Currency Social Experiment
In the words of Damien Hirst in an interview with Stephen Fry, “I’ve never really understood money. It’s like you look at money and its basic form. You know, all these things are money, commerce. They’re all ethereal. It relies not on notebooks or on pieces of paper or on, you know, things.”
His latest project The Currency consists of 10,000 entirely unique pieces of artwork, each of which will be released as high-resolution NFTs on Palm, a new environmentally friendly NFT ecosystem that’s built on the Ethereum blockchain. The physical pieces of art were all created by Damien Hirst himself on 10,000 uniform pieces of paper in his signature spot painting style, which has become one of the most universally recognizable motifs in modern art. Each of the 10,000 physical works will be secured in a vault in Hirst’s home country of the United Kingdom.
If you want to purchase the NFT version of one of the pieces in the collection, you can do so on HENI’s website, the virtual gallery that’s selling the collection. Each NFT will be sold for $2,000 initially, which can be paid in Ether, Bitcoin, USD Coin, Dai, and credit and debit cards. However, buyers must apply to purchase one of the 10,000 works, and not every applicant will be given the opportunity to buy one of the NFTs.
This is where things get a little crazy, though. The application process is set to end on July 21, 2021. Two months after that, anyone who has been able to purchase one of the 10,000 pieces will be given the option of redeeming their NFT for the corresponding physical artwork. For every one of the NFTs that does not get redeemed, the corresponding physical artwork will be destroyed. So, the choice is yours. Do you hold onto your NFT and live with the fact that an original Damien Hirst will be destroyed because of it? Or do you redeem your NFT, which may very well appreciate wildly in value, and get the chance to hang a Damien Hirst on your wall? It’s certainly not an easy decision.
Spot Painting and The Currency Physical Works
Damien Hirst began his career by making messy, multicolored dots randomly on canvas. Later in his career, he transitioned to creating perfect dots that were uniformly spaced with mechanical precision. This period of his career has persisted for over 20 years. But now, for The Currency, Hirst is returning to his roots and has created 10,000 sheets of paper covered in sloppy dots of every color imaginable.
According to Hirst, no two of the dots in any of the works are exactly the same color. Additionally, no two of the artworks are identical. Hirst painted all 10,000 pieces of paper by hand. God knows how long that must have taken him.
The multicolored dots are not the marks on the artworks, however. Each individual piece will have a unique number from 1 to 10,000 and a unique title, all handwritten by Hirst himself. The works will also feature Hirst’s signature as well as a holographic watermark that features a side profile of Hirst’s head. Finally, a microdot will be placed in the corner of each work for identification and authentication purposes.
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The spot painting style has become one of the longstanding motifs throughout Hirst’s career that has helped propel him to his position as one of the world’s most renowned contemporary artists. Thus, it only seems right that he should employ that style for one of his biggest and most interactive projects yet. Each of the 10,000 works has rough edges that are bleeding through with paint, sometimes Hirst’s handwriting is sloppy, and it’s all so wonderfully unique and provocative.
NFTs and the Artist’s Intentions
The Currency is intended to make people make a decision between keeping their NFT or redeeming it for a physical piece of art. In this way, Hirst is raising a number of important questions about what gives currency value, the future for physical artworks, and the relationship between art and money. In an interview with Bloomberg, Joe Hage, one of Hirst’s advisors, said, “It’s often said that money corrupts art,but this is an attempt of art corrupting money.”
Indeed, it seems that Hirst may be trying to make a statement about the triviality of currency, showing that anything can become currency if people assign value to it, even a piece of paper covered in multicolored dots or an image on the computer screen. And in doing so, he may be striking at a fear that many people have about NFTs (and many other types of currency): that they’re essentially worthless.
While it seems unfathomable that someone would spend $69 million on something with no value, NFTs seem to come down to digital ownership rights of an asset, an asset that someone else can go online and copy and paste nonetheless. However, this is not a unique problem to NFTs. The dollar is no longer tied to a corresponding amount of gold in Fort Knox, and the fact that there are new Dogecoins being made every minute makes them essentially worthless, yet people still consider these valid currencies.
The whole idea of currency is complicated and beyond the comprehension of most normal people, which is what I think Hirst may be trying to highlight with this project. By producing his own currency based on a series of dot paintings, he’s bringing to light the absurdity of the concept of currency, or assigning value to something arbitrarily. With that being said, though, Hirst surely stands to make an absurd amount of currency from this project.
The initial sale of 10,000 pieces at $2,000 each will yield $20 million, and then there’s the fact that Hirst will have a whole bunch of NFTs left over that are almost guaranteed to appreciate in value. Yeah, The Currency is set to only further cement Hirst’s reputation as one of the most commercially successful artists of all time.