Nfts
Damien Hirst paintings linked to NFTs were mass-produced years later than expected – here’s why holders say it doesn’t matter – DL News
- Investors are ignoring the controversy over the provenance of Damien Hirst’s NFTs.
- This is not the first time Hirst has come under scrutiny 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 expected.
Officially launching in 2021, the British artist said the works in The Currency collection were created in 2016. It has now been revealed that at least 1,000 of these works were produced through 2019.
According to data of NFT Price Floor, collectible trading NFTs for around $3,100. At their peak in 2021, NFTs sold for as much as $46,000.
But in some NFT circles, the Guardian article – in which one source likened Hirst’s production process to a “Henry Ford production line” – was met with a shrug.
“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 their ability to record the provenance of digital art. Who created the art, when it was made, and a record of each person who owns it is immediately verifiable by checking the blockchain the NFT was created on.
But when it comes to physical art tied 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 preserved animals immersed in formaldehyde.
When he launched The Currency in 2021, the move helped legitimize NFTs and opened a new avenue for Hirst to sell his work.
At $2,000 apiece, the 10,000 The Currency NFTs earned Hirst some $20 million, plus post-sale royalties.
NFT collector Shahbazyan said it didn’t matter to him that more than 1,000 of the artworks behind the NFTs were produced in 2018 and 2019, despite Hirst’s earlier claim that the entire collection had was created in 2016.
He also pointed out that Hirst made no secret of the fact that not all artworks were personally created by him.
The Currency is a joint collection of physical artwork and NFTs consisting of 10,000 unique paintings featuring colorful hand-painted dots on paper.
Initially, the physical artworks curated by Hirst each had an NFT counterpart.
A little over a year after the collection’s launch, owners were forced to choose between keeping their NFTs or trading them for physical works of art: they could keep one, but not the other.
Hirst later burned the remaining physical artworks that have not been claimed by NFT holders.
“It could be clearer”
It’s not uncommon to backdate a work of art to the date it was conceived, rather than the date it was produced, said Dusty, a pseudonymous digital artist who has sold artworks for a value of several thousand dollars in the form of NFT. DL News.
He said that as The Currency artwork has the same concept and design, he sees no problem with Hirst producing another batch at a later date to add to the original artwork while dating the entire collection back to 2016.
Yet this is not the first time Hirst has been scrutinized for backdating his art. In March, the Guardian revealed that several of his formaldehyde sculptures were dated to the 1990s, even though they were made in 2017.
At the time, Hirst’s lawyers denied that he had been deliberately misleading, arguing that it was his “usual practice” to date the physical works of a concept art project with the project’s conception date.
“Maybe it could be clearer when a collection is conceptualized and when it’s finished,” Dusty said of The Currency. “This is perhaps something Hirst could have been more transparent about.”
Tim Craig is DL News’ DeFi correspondent based in Edinburgh. Contact us with advice at tim@dlnews.com.