Media event – Damien Hirst will burn 4851 paintings that have become NFTs

And here we go again! Normal. The career of our dear Damien Hirst, who is the same on his 58th birthday, is due to media sensations. He is therefore no longer tied to his works, but to his actions. It should be noted, however, that the Briton knows how to keep his audience, made up mostly of new riches, in suspense. The recent production, during the confinements, of paintings entirely made by himself on the theme of the cherry tree in bloom is exceptional. Normally our man delegates the work to hundreds of little hands. He has become more of a contemporary art industrialist. Now he is the wholesaler.

Two thousand francs each

All of this brings me to the work of the day. In 2016, the Englishman commissioned a trifle of ten thousand canvases, each linked to an NFT. Apparently they had all found buyers. It must be said that their price was calculated for once not in millions, but in thousands of our francs. Two thousand, to be precise. The artistic equivalent of the Dior or Chanel t-shirt. Until now, these multiples of small dots existed in two versions. The real and the virtual. Hirst asked customers this year to individually choose which one they would keep in the future. These goos had until July 27 to decide. Fashion is for NFTs, which in my opinion are not as serious as cryptocurrencies, almost most of the owners have decided on this formula. Their exact number is 4851.

The failure of Venice

What will happen now? On 9 September Damien will open his new exhibition at the Newport Street Gallery. A place specially dedicated to superstar and super kitsch Hirst. The attraction of this hanging will be to see the 4851 paintings gradually burn, which will only exist in the form of tokens. A true autodafé. Advertising in hell! This should help liquidate the rest. Things don’t always go smoothly with our man. Witness the remains of his titanic exhibition at the Pinault Foundation in Venice in 2017. You probably remember the thing I told you about at the time. Hirst had imagined the remains of a boat sunk in Roman times in two sites (Palazzo Grassi and Punta della Dogana). I found it disastrous. A shipwreck in every sense.

The rest doesn’t move

What about the other dot charts? Well, their buyers will keep them as they are. It is probably safer, even though they may seem cumbersome. You can’t destroy everything. That said, Hirst would add some of his recent hits to the vanity pyre that I frankly wouldn’t mind. He could thus begin with the cherry trees seen at the Cartier Foundation in Paris. These trees, in my opinion, would have prevented you from eating cherries for your entire life … But many people liked them. Normal again. It was very, very expensive.

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