Why has Damien Hirst been burning thousands of his paintings?

I heard something about Damien Hirst burning his artwork. Can’t he afford his heating bills either?

You’d be tempted to think so, but no. The ageing bad boy of the Brit Art scene is in the news for burning his own work in a series of posh-looking furnaces installed at London’s Newport Street Gallery.

Ahh so maybe he’s just hungry. Was it is one of his cows in formaldehyde?

Wrong again, and I’m not sure formaldehyde’s that tasty anyway, even if barbecued in a fancy furnace. Instead, Hirst has been consigning 4,851 smallish spot paintings to the flames in the finale to his The Currency project, launched last year.

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I’m confused. So he made the work, and now he’s burning it?

Still wrong. Hirst tends not to make most of his own work. He has a posse of assistants to do it for him. And although he is on hand in London, clad in silver fireproof pants, it’s mainly the assistants, and a model or two in orange overalls, doing the actual burning.

[ Damien Hirst: ‘I was a Catholic until I was 12. I loved the imagery – the blood’ ]

So is it all about spectacle for people with more money than sense?

Now you’re getting it. And Hirst is milking it. In early 2021 the artist made $22.4 million when he sold more than 7,000 prints on the cryptocurrency market. A few months later, presumably buoyed by the artistic gratification of it all, he put 10,000 spotty works on the market, each one coming with a matching non-fungible token, or NFT.

I’m waiting for the catch

Don’t you mean the gimmick? And you’re right again. Buyers — and, believe it or not, there were plenty, even at $2,000 a pop — didn’t actually get their nice spotty picture. Instead the deal was they had to wait a year, and then choose: take the NFT or the actual artwork. Go for the NFT, the corresponding painting gets burned.

Remind me about the whole NFT thing

Ah yes, our old friend the non-fungible token. It’s a unique digital thingy that says, basically, that there’s only one of it — even though it’s only digital and technically infinitely repeatable. And, as we know, the superrich do like having things no one else can have. They’re also potentially handy, though we didn’t say this out loud, for anyone who wants to move their money around on the quiet, stash it somewhere safe, or even make it a little cleaner that it otherwise might have been.

[ What the hell are NFTs and what do they mean for art? ]

Surely you’re not suggesting...

Absolutely not in this instance, but the contemporary-art market has been tarnished with tales of all of the above, and the problem with using a priceless painting as a means to stash your cash is that you have to pay all the costs of storing and insuring. You could say that NFTs came along as the answer to a certain kind of prayer.

But not in this instance, right?

Exactly. At $2,000 they were hardly going to do the job, but multiply that by 10,000 and it is a nice little earner for Hirst. Anyway, despite a recent and, to be honest, not-that-unexpected plummet in the NFT market, almost half the buyers opted to send their spots to the furnace.

There must be something in it for them

Depends on what you consider fun. Seemingly, those who’ve held on to the NFTs got the chance to visit the artist in his studio, and a spotty umbrella for Christmas. One collector said the NFT was more “an access card to the Damien Hirst club”. In a final flourish, the people who opted to stay digital also got a surprise of another original work on paper as a gift. Whether they burn them themselves in emulation of their hero is another question entirely.