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You are here: Home / Economics / C.R.E.A.M. / Late Night Open Thread: NFTs Are for Setting Money on Fire, HirstWorks Edition

Late Night Open Thread: NFTs Are for Setting Money on Fire, HirstWorks Edition

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There are critics who aver that Damien Hirst’s career has been less about creating than about performing. He has, for many years, admitted that most of “his” work was actually done by his ‘assistants’:

Hirst once said he didn’t paint his own spot paintings because, “I couldn’t be f***ing arsed doing it,” according to The Guardian.

Given that pedigree, perhaps the latest Hirst performance was predictable. Per Matt Levine, at Bloomberg:

I guess you have three options:

1- Pay Damien Hirst £2,000 and get one of his dot paintings;
2- Pay Damien Hirst £2,000 and not get one of his dot paintings; or
3- Don’t pay Damien Hirst £2,000 at all.

I know what I would choose (what I have chosen), but the market seems pretty evenly divided between Options 1 and 2:

The British artist and art collector created 10,000 unique dot paintings in 2016 which corresponded with a collection of 10,000 NFTs, a unique digital token that can be traded online.

In “The Currency”, Hirst’s first NFT collection, he gave his buyers the choice to exchange their NFT version – worth £2,000 – for the physical artwork…

Hirst, reportedly the UK’s wealthiest living artist, pledged to destroy all the original artworks that people decided not to exchange their virtual token for.

As a result, he will torch thousands of paintings – collectively worth almost £10 million – starting on Tuesday afternoon at the Newport Street Gallery in London.

[Yes, readers: Hirst has publicly torched a bunch of dotworks, live at the Turner Gallery.]

The advantages of not exchanging your NFT for the physical artwork are (1) this way you don’t have to find a place to hang a Damien Hirst dot painting in your house and (2) the image of Damien Hirst lighting thousands of his paintings on fire because nobody wants them is in fact very funny, and you have contributed to that act of comedy. The disadvantages are (1) you paid him £2,000 and (2) now you have nothing. Oh you have an NFT, you have an NFT, you have an NFT…

The market for NFTs has collapsed, but in the bull market of 2021 thousands of artists and hucksters had this exact same idea, which was “I will make or acquire some art object, light it on fire, and sell an NFT ‘of’ the incinerated object to crypto people.” Hirst, being an art industrialist, introduced mass production into the mix, but his basic idea was an exact copy of everyone else’s. The “object-fire-token-money NFT cycle,” I have called it.

As a matter of finance, I cannot fault this: If you can identify a bubble, and you have some free time, the right move is to sell into the bubble. But as art I hate it. It’s so stupid! Everyone involved should be incredibly embarrassed! What an absolute lack of creativity! Everything about this is the opposite of art! If you find yourself lighting thousands of your paintings on fire because nobody wants them, the obvious conclusion to take from that is that you are a bad artist, and that conclusion is correct!

Hirst is a crappy artist, but as a performer, he has certainly earned a spot in the Huckster Hall of Infamy!

Reader Interactions

42Comments

  1. 1.

    oklahomo

    If no one wants to buy the physical ones how is the “collectively worth almost £10 million” determined?

  7. 7.

    A woman from anywhere (formerly Mohagan)

    NFTs sounded like utter BS from the first time AL wrote about them (which was the first I had heard about them – thanks for keeping me current, AL!).  Nothing that has happened since has changed my mind, although it is a little amusing to watch all this money-burning play out.  I guess NFTs are the cocaine of the early 2020s (i.e a sign you have too much money).

  10. 10.

    Geminid

    @bjacques: Some FAFO Fella made a Fella avatar for Cheryl Rofer, and now she uses it for her Twitter account. It’s one of those dogs in a lab coat.

  11. 11.

    sab

    @oatler: I have five beany babies and I love every one. Being a bad mother I have a favorite. A sea cow sitting on top of my woody  station wagon from BP twenty years ago.

    BP used to give us tiny plastic cars if we bought enough gas. I have a bunch of them.

    ETA I have a couple of cars with baby Jesuses from Mardi Gras cakes. I have them sitting in BP cars because I don’t know what to do with them. You can’t throw out a baby Jesus.

  14. 14.

    lowtechcyclist

    @opiejeanne: ​
     

    Silly opiejeanne! Anything the hip kids are saying that people like you and I have caught up with is no longer hip, and they stopped saying it somewhere between a few weeks and a few years ago.

    I kinda sorta understand the NAFO Fellas, but I’m not sure I could explain them coherently, let alone succinctly.

  15. 15.

    Geminid

    @opiejeanne: There is a large, loosely knit group that pushes back on Russian apologists on Twitter, and calls itself the  North American Fellows Organization, NAFO. Most all their pictures have the head of the same particular dog breed. Some favor cats instead.

    They are effective enough that some lefties complain they’re a CIA Operation. I liken them to the K-Hive.

  19. 19.

    Geminid

     

     

    @JanieM: Thank you for the correction, I got it wrong at #15. NAFO is an international organization and many Ukrainians participate. They do some good fundraising.

  20. 20.

    opiejeanne

    @Geminid: Thanks. I did know about the NAFOs, (I must have read it wrong, I thought someone said FAFOs) but not about the avatar. I haven’t seen a lot of that. I must hand out with the wrong crowd.

  21. 21.

    Ken

    @Geminid: They are effective enough that some lefties complain they’re a CIA Operation.

    To which the only suitable reply is the old joke, “How do we know the CIA wasn’t involved in the Kennedy assassination?  He’s dead.”

  24. 24.

    David 🌈 ☘The Establishment☘🌈 Koch

    @NotMax: ​
      Witty, but Too long to be a good tabloid headline.

    Off the top of my head: King Con; Feds Go Ape; The Art of the Steal; Comic-Con; Gorilla Art;

  25. 25.

    David 🌈 ☘The Establishment☘🌈 Koch

    @Ken: ​
      Heh!

    Here’s an oldie, but goodie:

    An August 1978 CIA study titled “Iran after the Shah” concluded that “Iran is not in a revolutionary or even a ‘prerevolutionary’ situation.”

    The Shah was deposed 5 months later.

  30. 30.

    David 🌈 ☘The Establishment☘🌈 Koch

    @Ceci n est pas mon nym: ​
      Hell. They tried to recruit me out of college for that. In the pre internet days they wanted me to use my language skills to monitor foreign broadcasts and read foreign journals and newspapers and file digests and reports. Pay stunk so sadly I turned it down, otherwise I would have loved to travel Europe right outta college and work with Jack Ryan.

  33. 33.

    MattF

    For the record, a site that tracks the ‘web3’ crap. It’s somewhere between ‘amusing’ and ‘Law and Crime’.

  34. 34.

    Frankensteinbeck

    There are critics who aver that Damien Hirst’s career has been less about creating than about performing.

    A painful demonstration that the big money art world has very little to do with art and everything to do with impressing your friends.  NFTs fit in perfectly.

    @catclub:

    I’d forgotten just how straightforward that song is about expensive prostitution and the traditional role of diamonds in it.

    @sdhays:

    I see what you did there.

  35. 35.

    kindness

    People who actually paid money for NFTs are a sure sign those people have way too much money and that their tiny brains are fighting with their bloated egos.  We are not shocked the egos are winning.

  42. 42.

    ColoradoGuy

    Hmm … maybe we could use the Damien Hirst Index to set top tax rates? The presence of this kind of money-burning in the top 0.1% makes it clear they have far too much, and are just playing with it like a three-year-old. So adjust top rates until we see less of this behavior. In effect, use art-world prices as a proxy for excess wealth. and keep adjusting tax rates until the art world calms down.

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