Damien Hirst: The Currency
Released in 2021, Damien Hirst’s The Currency Series is a collection of 10,000 NFTs which correspond with 10,000 original artworks. Collectors were given the choice to either keep the NFT or exchange it for the physical artwork. The artwork explores the boundaries of art and currency—when art changes and becomes a currency, and when currency becomes art.
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The physical works started their creation in 2016, each of which features a unique pattern of blue, red, green, yellow and magenta dots. The works were created by dipping a stick in the paint and repeatedly placing the spots randomly across 100 different works at a time. To achieve a unique finish to each of the works, Hirst made sure to leave in paint bleeds and splatters, each of which helped to differentiate one from the last.
To avoid counterfeit works being entered into the market, Hirst included an exclusive watermark, holographic stamp and ‘Micro-dot’ on each work as well as his signature and the name of the work written on the back. HENI also gave collectors the ability to search their edition number on their website and view the percentage of colours used, characteristics and numbers of characters used in the title of the work.
The Currency is an expansion of a series of works created by Hirst in his early career where he first experimented with using spots in his work. This series featured hand-created ‘messy’ spots which Hirst then reflected on by saying ‘I hated them, so then I created perfect spots. For 25 years I then made perfect spots, and in the very end I’ve come back to making messy ones again.”
After the Exchange deadline, on 27th July 2022, 5149 chose to keep their works as physical works, and 4851 physical works were burned in exchange for NFTs.
Image via Design Boom
In October 2022, Damien Hirst publicly burned the first 1000 of the 4851 physical works in an event called ‘The Burn’. Dressed in a silver metallic boiler-suit trousers and matching fire safety gloves Hirst invited journalists to film him throwing the works in furnaces in London's Newport Street Gallery. When questioned how he felt during the event Hirst said ‘It feels good, better than I expected’.
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Explore works from ‘The Currency’ Series available from Extraordinary Objects:
