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Damien Hirst
5581 I Never Knew Him, from The Currency
- Estimate
- HK$60,000 - 80,000€7,300 - 9,800$7,700 - 10,300
Further Details
“The Currency is an artwork, and anyone who buys it will participate in this work, it’s not just about owning it. It is the most exciting project I have ever worked on by far.”
— Damien Hirst
The Currency was Damien Hirst’s first NFT project. The series, released in 2021, included a total of 10,000 NFTs, also known as Tenders, which correspond to 10,000 unique physical artworks painted in 2016. Successful buyers initially received the NFTs but, around a year later in July 2022, they had the option to exchange the NFT for the physical artwork. If they chose the NFT, the artwork would be destroyed, and vice versa.— Damien Hirst
Just under half of collectors (4,851) decided to keep the NFT, which resulted in the corresponding physical artwork being burnt by Hirst. Most collectors (5,149) chose to keep the physical artwork, which resulted in the NFT being “burnt”, or permanently destroyed on the blockchain. Ever the innovator, Hirst’s project was both novel and controversial. When he began burning the physical artworks, he said "A lot of people think I'm burning millions of dollars of art but I'm not. I'm completing the transformation of these physical artworks into NFTs by burning the physical versions.” In this way, The Currency was a poignant exploration of art, money, commerce and, most importantly, the role of belief in creating value.“The whole project is an experiment in belief. As an artist, it should be an equal problem to burn an NFT and to burn a piece of paper. But I have a much harder problem burning the paper than I do the NFTs, and that exposes something in me.”
Damien Hirst
British | 1965There is no other contemporary artist as maverick to the art market as Damien Hirst. Foremost among the Young British Artists (YBAs), a group of provocative artists who graduated from Goldsmiths, University of London in the late 1980s, Hirst ascended to stardom by making objects that shocked and appalled, and that possessed conceptual depth in both profound and prankish ways.
Regarded as Britain's most notorious living artist, Hirst has studded human skulls in diamonds and submerged sharks, sheep and other dead animals in custom vitrines of formaldehyde. In tandem with Cheyenne Westphal, now Chairman of Phillips, Hirst controversially staged an entire exhibition directly for auction with 2008's "Beautiful Inside My Head Forever," which collectively totalled £111 million ($198 million).
Hirst remains genre-defying and creates everything from sculpture, prints, works on paper and paintings to installation and objects. Another of his most celebrated series, the 'Pill Cabinets' present rows of intricate pills, cast individually in metal, plaster and resin, in sterilized glass and steel containers; Phillips New York showed the largest of these pieces ever exhibited in the United States, The Void, 2000, in May 2017.