Damien Hirst’s New NFTs Could Make $ 20 Million As Art World Goes Crypto

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British artist Damien Hirst. Stéphane De Sakutin / AFP via Getty Images

British artist Damien Hirst could raise $ 20 million from a new set of NFTs or non-fungible tokens.

Blurring the lines between physical and digital art, Hirst launched a project called The Currency. It consists of 10,000 NFTs which each correspond to physical fingerprints created by Hirst five years ago and stored in a safe in the UK.

The physical works are point paintings with titles generated by machine learning applied to song lyrics. Each piece is individually numbered and signed by the artist, and features a hologram containing a portrait of Hirst.

The NFTs will cost $ 2,000 and will be available for purchase starting July 29 at the Heni online art market.

NFTs are digital files such as JPEGs or video clips that live on a blockchain, where they are authenticated by a network of computers and their ownership can be tracked and verified.

Read more: Insiders have growing confidence in the art market

NFTs are gaining popularity in the art and music world. An artist known as Beeple sold a single JPEG in the form of an NFT for $ 69 million in March at an auction at Christies, beating record prices for works by classic artists such as Georges Seurat and Francisco Goya.

Bands like Kings of Leon are now releasing albums in NFT form. And the tweets were expensive, including the $ 2.9 million paid for the first tweet from Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey.

DraftKings (ticker: DKNG), meanwhile, is launching an NFT marketplace for sports collectibles. A new film starring Anthony Hopkins, Zero Contact, is slated for release this summer on an NFT and video platform called Vuele.

Hirst did offer a twist to the NFT market, however: it forces buyers to choose between digital art and physical art.

Collectors of NFT will have the choice of keeping the digital token or exchanging it for a physical print. If they want to keep the NFT, the paper version will be burnt on July 27, 2022. If they opt for the print, the NFT will be destroyed.

Art collectors will therefore be faced with a day of judgment, choosing which version they think is more valuable, physical or digital. The NFTs have recently garnered prizes that exceed physical art. Whether this is a digital tulip bubble is a question Hirst unloads to the community of collectors, traders and speculators.

I have no idea what people are going to do, Hirst told CNBC on Wednesday. A lot of people in the physical art world really dislike people in the digital art world and vice versa, he added. It’s great to see what’s going to happen, and I have no idea.

Hirst, one of the most successful artists in history, accepts payments in cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin, Ethereum, USD Coin, and Dai. In March, it sold 7,481 prints for $ 3,000 each, for $ 22.4 million, accepting payments in cryptos such as Ethereum and Bitcoin. according to Artnet.

NFTs for The Currency will live on the Palm blockchain, running on the Ethereum network.

When asked if he would keep the crypto or convert it to cash, Hirst said he plans to hold onto the crypto. I like all currencies, he says.

Write to Daren Fonda at [email protected]

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