NFTs
Damien Hirst paintings linked to NFTs were mass-produced years later than alleged – here’s why holders say it doesn’t matter – DL News
- Investors ignore the controversy over the provenance of Damien Hirst’s NFTs.
- This isn’t the first time Hirst has been criticized for backdating his art.
An explosive report has revealed that non-fungible tokens from artist Damien Hirst’s The Currency collection were mass-produced years later than claimed.
Officially launched in 2021, the British artist said the art in The Currency collection was created in 2016. It has now been revealed that at least 1,000 of the artworks were produced by 2019.
According to data from the NFT Price Floor, NFTs in the collection trade for around $3,100. At the peak of 2021, NFTs sold for as much as $46,000.
But in some NFT circles, the Guardian article – in which one source compared Hirst’s production process to a “Henry Ford production line” – was met with disdain.
“I don’t waste my time thinking about it,” said MaxNaut, a pseudonymous NFT collector who owns 15 The Currency NFTs. DL News.
“As a holder, I don’t care, it doesn’t bother me,” said Paruyr Shahbazyan, an NFT art collector who owns 10 The Currency NFTs. DL News.
One of the biggest selling points of NFTs is the ability to record the provenance of digital art. Who made the art, when it was made, and a record of each person who owned it are immediately verifiable by checking the blockchain on which the NFT was created.
But when it comes to physical art linked to NFTs, as in the case of Hirst’s The Currency, things get murky.
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Hirst, by some accounts, is the most profitable working artist in the world. He was at the forefront of the Young British Artists movement in the 1990s and shocked the art world with sculptures of animals preserved submerged in formaldehyde.
When he launched The Currency in 2021, the move helped legitimize NFTs and opened up a new avenue for Hirst to sell his work.
Costing $2,000 each, The Currency’s 10,000 NFTs netted about $20 million for Hirst, plus post-sale royalty fees.
NFT collector Shahbazyan said it didn’t matter to him that more than 1,000 works of art behind the NFTs were produced in 2018 and 2019, despite Hirst’s previous claim that the entire collection was created in 2016.
He also highlighted that Hirst did not hide the fact that not all works of art were created personally by him.
The Currency is a joint physical artwork and NFT collection consisting of 10,000 unique colorful dot paintings hand-painted on paper.
Initially, the physical artworks, which were retained by Hirst, each had an NFT counterpart.
Just over a year after the collection’s launch, owners were forced to choose between keeping their NFTs or exchanging them for the physical artworks — they could keep one but not the other.
Hirst later burned the remaining physical artworks that have not been claimed by NFT holders.
‘Could be clearer’
Updating artwork to its conception date rather than its production date is not uncommon, said Dusty, a pseudonymous digital artist who has sold thousands of dollars worth of art as NFTs. DL News.
He said that because The Currency’s artworks have the same concept and design, he sees no problem with Hirst producing another batch later to add to the original works, while still dating the entire collection to 2016.
Still, this isn’t the first time Hirst has been scrutinized for retroacting his art. In March, the Guardian revealed that several of his formaldehyde sculptures were dated to the 1990s, although they were made in 2017.
At the time, Hirst’s lawyers denied that he had deliberately misled, arguing that it was his “usual practice” to date physical works in a conceptual art project with the project’s conception date.
“Perhaps it could be clearer when a collection is conceptualized and when it is completed,” Dusty said of The Currency. “Perhaps this is something Hirst could have been more transparent about.”
Tim Craig is DeFi correspondent for DL News in Edinburgh. Get in touch with tips at tim@dlnews.com.