Nfts
Damien Hirst backdated at least 1,000 paintings from his NFT project, investigation reveals
Damien Hirst is under surveillance again for antedate his works. A Guardian report published yesterday reveals that at least 1,000 of the oil-on-paper paintings created for a recent NFT project were not made in 2016, as the artist claimed, but were in fact mass-produced in 2018 and 2019 by dozens of painters hired by Hirst. company Science Ltd in two studios, in Gloucestershire and London. One source described it as a “Henry Ford production line.”
A total of 10,000 paintings were produced for The Currency project, each marked with a microdot, an embossed stamp of authenticity and a title, date and signature written in pencil. back. When the project launched in 2021, Hirst and Heni, the publishing platform run by Hirst’s business manager and licensed to sell the works, repeatedly stated that the paintings were “created by hand in 2016 “.
Intended to “explore the frontiers of art and currency”, as Hirst said told the art journal in March 2021, The Currency was designed as an NFT project: each painting was linked to a corresponding digital token. Buyers had the option to purchase one of 10,000 NFTs for $2,000 each, and then had to choose whether to keep it or exchange it for physical labor. The initial sale was around $18 million.
For those who chose the NFT, numbering in the thousands, their corresponding work on paper was burned by Hirst at his Newport Street Gallery in October 2022
According to one collector who opted for the physical painting, no certificate of authenticity was issued when he collected the work from Heni’s headquarters in Soho. The day he chose to keep the painting, the NFT was removed from his metamask wallet and all email links, including the one to his receipt, disappeared.
Traditionally, dates assigned to works of art generally refer to the year they were completed, but lawyers for Science and Heni say it is “usual” for Hirst to date works based on when they were completed. were designed. They did not dispute that at least 1,000 of the paintings the artist said were dated 2016 were actually painted several years later. According to Guardian sources, “several thousand” paintings were produced in 2018-2019.
Hirst’s lawyers had a similar response in March when the Guardian revealed that several formaldehyde sculptures had been dated by his company to the 1990s, although they were made in 2017. “Artists have every right to be (and often are) inconsistent in dating their works,” they said. -they told the Guardian at the time.
As for La Monnaie, it remains to be seen whether the question of dating will affect the value of the paintings. To date, around 100 examples have been resold at auction, all bearing the date 2016, according to Artnet’s price database. Prices vary between £5,000 and £28,000.