If something gets burned somewhere, media attention is almost guaranteed. Damien Hirst will also have made this calculation for his exhibition “The Currency”, which opens September 23 at his private gallery, the Newport Street Gallery in London. Some of his works will be burned. The largest campaign has been announced for October 11.
The 57-year-old artist knows all the tricks of the trade in self-marketing, he has penetrated the attention economy and made himself useful. It is not for nothing that he was for a long time the “most expensive living artist in the world”. Critics either love him or hate him. There’s not much in between.
art as currency
Like Jeff Koons before him, Hirst is now working on NFTs. It is Hirst’s first NFT project and has now been running for a year: Hirst has linked 10,000 specially produced and individually embossed spot images to so-called Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs). NFTs are digital certificates that cannot be manipulated and are therefore virtual originals, secured in a blockchain.
Hirst’s dotted images have been around for a year and are all different but very similar both physically and virtually. Buyers could purchase a work for around €2,050 (US$2,000) each and then were given the choice of keeping the digital token or exchanging it for a paper equivalent work. Now the decision has been made: 5,149 people have exchanged their NFT for an enamel dot painting. This leaves 4,851 NFTs in circulation. Hirst will now exhibit the physical templates for the NFTs – then burn them. One fire will be lit each day and the rest will be lit at the start of the Frieze art fair in London from 12-4pm. be fired in October.
Damien Hirst described his project to The Art Newspaper as his “most exciting yet”, touching on the “idea of art as currency and storehouse of wealth”. It’s no coincidence that governments adorn coins and banknotes with art: “They do it so that we can trust money. Without art, it’s hard for us humans to believe in anything.”
Bundeskunsthalle sets the tone with a discourse format about blockchain
Kolja Reichert finds Hirst’s view of the virtual rather conventional. Since 2020, the curator and art critic has been organizing new discourse formats at the Bundeskunsthalle in Bonn, including the opportunities that blockchain technology offers for expanded participation. “Damien Hirst gets bogged down in the criteria for owning analogue art,” he told DW. The NFTs are much more about circulation than possession in the sense of traditional collecting.
In short, there is a lot of potential in blockchain technology that artists could also use to re-discuss social issues. Or artists. One of those with whom Reichert spends a lot of time on these questions is the German conceptual and media artist Hito Steyerl. In 2021, as a satirical response and commentary to the NFT hype on the art market, she quickly turned the major German cultural institutions – Bundeskunsthalle, Humboldt Forum – into NFTs – and declared ownership. In their current position, NFTs seemed like the equivalent of toxic masculinity in the art market, Steyerl criticized at a 2021 event.
Participation and sustainability – also in art and culture
Potentials that should be explored instead are those of participation and thinking about property as such, argues Reichert. An example he picked up this year at the Bundeskunsthalle was an NFT project by the Kunstkreis Kongolesischer Plantagenarbeiter*innen (CATPC): the Congolese art collective formed 300 NFTs of the sculpture “Balot” in collaboration with artist Renzo Martens. The statue was created in 1931 by the Pende, an ethnic group in the Democratic Republic of Congo, to banish the ghost of Belgian colonial official Maximilien Balot. After he committed rapes and other atrocities, the Pende rebelled. Balot was beheaded.
The original of the statue is now in a museum in Virginia. The NFTs of CAPTA and Renzo Martens were offered for sale at Art Basel in 2022. The money generated from the sale went directly to the former palm oil plantation in Lusanga, Congo, where the original statue was once made. “This action creates measurable effects, namely the repurchase of land,” explains Reichert. The land is not only bought, but also replanted and cultivated – creating local income. On the other hand, the action deals with how the sculpture, still considered a figure of power by the Pende, came to the said museum in Virginia through a European dealer.
In addition to buying back the land and building sustainable agriculture, the collective uses the proceeds to bring cultural life back to Lusanga. Maybe someday the “Balot”. According to Reichert, these are the really interesting questions about ownership: “What does this Virginia museum actually own? Is the museum’s authority greater? Or that of the people who live in the region today, who are eager to return it to its original use? ?”
Art (un)worthy as a work of art?
Damien Hirst made it an art form to make art with non-artistic objects. That he now reduces art to money is a provocation. But against the background of all the possibilities of blockchain technology – including for art – it becomes clear how much Damien Hirst’s project is tied to an old currency system, NFT or not. Negotiating the possibilities of the new technologies for art and art ownership or trade cannot succeed if money remains the de facto reference value. The newspapers may be burning, but a fire of more interesting questions isn’t ignited in Damien Hirst’s latest gag.