Britain's Damien Hirst has started burning hundreds of his artworks after collectors chose to keep their non-fungible tokens (NFTs) – blockchain-based assets representing their digital images – instead of the physical object.
Hirst, famous for making art about wealth, launched his first NFT collection The Currency – 10,000 NFTs corresponding to 10,000 original artworks depicting colourful spots – in July 2021.
Collectors had to choose between keeping the NFT, which reportedly sold for $2,000, or swapping it for the physical artwork.
Nearly 5,150 picked the physical thing while 4,851 opted for the NFTs.
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British artist Damien Hirst at a burn event for his latest NFT exhibition 'The Currency' in London. /Hannah McKay/Reuters
Hirst told his Instagram followers on Monday (October 10) he would burn 1,000 artworks on Tuesday alone.
"When did I decide I was going to burn my art? I decided that once I gave people the opportunity to choose between physical and digital art, I had to decide what to do with the physical for all the people who chose digital so that was the point when I realised I had to destroy it," the artist said.
"And when we created the NFTs we burned them into existence so it made sense to remove the physicals through burning them into non-existence. It kind of made some sort of sense to me.”
The artworks, created in 2016 with enamel paint on handmade paper and each numbered, titled, stamped and signed, will be burned until The Currency exhibition closes on Oct. 30.