Damien Hirst To Burn Thousands of His Paintings To Show Art As 'Currency'

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: Damien Hirst, the artist famous for pickling dead animals in the 1990s, is to burn thousands of his paintings next month in a project focusing on art as currency. Hirst, who was the UK's richest artist in 2020 with a net worth of more than 315 million British pounds, will destroy the artworks at his London gallery. He created 10,000 unique dot paintings in 2016, each with its own title, that were later linked to corresponding NFTs and sold for $2,000 each. Buyers were given the option of keeping the NFTs or trading them in for the physical artwork. "The collector ... cannot keep both. This exchange is a one-way process, so choose carefully," buyers were told. Twenty-four hours before a deadline of 3pm Wednesday, 4,180 people had chosen to swap their NFT for a physical artwork, with 5,820 opting to keep their NFTs, according to Heni, a technology company focusing on the art market. The alternative version is to be destroyed, with the physical artworks -- oil on paper -- going up in flames on a daily basis from 9 September.

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