Visual arts|The works announced as painted in 2016 were apparently painted in 2018 and 2019.
British The Guardian tellsthat part visual artist Damien Hirstin The Currency -of the paintings in the series of works were painted in a conveyor belt style and years later than previously stated.
English Damien Hirst (b. 1965) is one of the most successful contemporary visual artists. His The Currency -series of works consists of 10,000 works the size of an A4 sheet of paper, all of which have colored dots on a white background.
The works in the series resemble industrially produced identical printed products, but are hand-painted unique works with individual tags.
Hirst got the idea for a series of works in 2016 after he painted a few hundred pieces of A4-sized color dot paintings. Their similarity and, on the other hand, the uniqueness of each individual work made him compare them to currency, which is what the name of the series of works refers to.
He has said that all 10,000 paintings were painted in that same year and they are dated to 2016. However, the sources interviewed by The Guardian newspaper say that the paintings were produced as an assembly line in 2018 and 2019.
There are apparently at least a thousand and possibly more of these later painted works. Dozens of painters were hired to make them, working in two studios. Some of them worked eight-hour days for several months, The Guardian reports. Enamel paints were used in the works, which is why the painters had to wear respirators whenever they painted. The painters went around the long tables on which the papers were spread, adding one dot of color to each piece at a time.
Hirstin the lawyers do not dispute The Guardian’s information about the time or circumstances of painting the works, but also do not comment on them directly. However, they deny the idea that Hirst would have deliberately misled with his dates, for example, but instead refers to the time when the works were conceived.
In principle, providing wrong information can affect the value of the works, but on the other hand, for example, during the Renaissance and Baroque, famous painters have produced works in their workshops with the help of their students.
of The Guardian according to that, the idea of a series of 10,000 pieces could only have arisen in 2018, when Hirst heard about non-fungible tokens (NFT), i.e. digital certificates of ownership, which can be used to make digital artworks individual and therefore ownable, which became the talk of the art world at the time. At the time, many considered just ten thousand pieces to be the basic amount of NFT art.
The Currency The individual works of the series went on sale in 2021 as NFT art. At the time, the price for one piece was $2,000, and buyers were drawn. The successful buyer candidates in the lottery could choose either the NFT version of the work, in which case the original paper version would be destroyed, or the original paper version, in which case the NFT version would be destroyed. 5,149 buyers chose paper versions.
The total sales amount in the summer of 2021 was around 18 million dollars. Since then, individual works have sold for multiple sums. Already in the fall of 2021, a buyer of the NFT version resold it for $172,000, Sky News has reported.
Damien Hirst destroyed the original versions of the NFTs in a cremation ceremony at his private museum in London in autumn 2022.