Damien Hirst: Art as Currency

And our Final Auction Update!

Dec 19, 2022

Damien Hirst has Spots to Sell. And NFTs. So many NFTs.

In the last newsletter, I wrote about Jeff Koons and his seemingly neverending supply of limited-edition fine art masterpieces. This week I will talk about Damien Hirst and his infinite spot paintings and what I assume are going to be endless NFT projects. (If the crypto market doesn’t completely collapse, which it very well might.)

There is a certain kind of artist who, for whatever reason, makes the same thing over and over. The person who immediately comes to my mind is Sean Scully. I feel like he has made variations on the same painting for just about forever. His pieces sell for up to $2,000,000 at auction, which means his gallery is probably selling works in the medium–to–high six-figure amount. Collectors love his stuff because they know exactly what they are gonna get, therefore he has a financial incentive to keep pumping them out. It’s boring, but he has status and a steady income.

seanscullystudio

A post shared by Sean Scully (@seanscullystudio)

Damien Hirst on the other hand has set up his business so he can repeat himself endlessly AND follow the latest trends. It’s clever and yet somehow still very dull. He has a passionate following though, and he - like Jeff Koons - is really good at selling stuff. I am not going to go into his full history (that’s what the internets are for) but you have probably heard of him or at least his most famous work The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living - a glass display case filled with a shark in formaldehyde. He’s done some interesting/shocking/fun work throughout the years, but he’s also made a lot of crap. He’s an example of someone who often makes art about the art market while at the same time being one of the most annoying parts of it.

Between 1988 and 2011 Hirst and his workshop made 1,365 spot paintings. This is the official total, although there are probably a few more out there. What is a spot painting? Well, there are rules! Each spot must be the same size, they must be placed in some sort of a grid, each one on a painting must be a different color, and there can be no black ones. The purpose of the spot paintings is to take away emotional choices and allow Hirst to use a scientific system to talk about color. It was always meant to be an infinite series, although I am not sure how many have been made after the 2011 cut-off point. There was a big show and book around the Spot paintings in 2012, hence the existence of that particular boundary

Artist Recreation of a Spot Painting - Screenprint & Photoshop

I am not against the Spot paintings in theory, but it’s an interesting idea that should have played itself out after a couple of hundred iterations. I don’t think there is much to say after that, although at this level of production, maybe having something to say is beside the point. I, a collector, think the Spot paintings are cool and wish I had one. All of my friends do, and I want to have all the things they have because they have the best things, and I want to show that I can have those things too, but I missed out. Oh, wait! Rather than waiting for one to show up at auction, I can check in with Hirst and see if they are going to release more. And they are! AND WHY SHOULDN’T HE GET THE MONEY FOR THE SPOT PAINTING BUYER DEMAND RATHER THAN LETTING THE FLIPPERS GET IT? And that right there is the crux of the matter. A lot of Hirst’s career is about him trying to capture the profits that normally go to the folks in the secondary market. On one hand, I can’t fault him for trying. On the other, these are being made in such quantities they become meaningless.

But I promised you NFTs! In 2016 Hirst (his workshop I assume) made 10,000 different spot paintings, although I have also heard them referred to as dot paintings because the grid rule seems to have gone out the window. They are all different, signed, and named based on song lyrics. (NFTs were invented at this time but weren’t big, so I wonder if the paintings were created for another reason and then repurposed once NFTs hit the mainstream.) In 2021 each painting was then linked to an NFT and those tokens were sold for $2,000 each. Hirst kept 1,000 tokens for himself and made about $18,000,000 on the initial sale. Buyers were able to sell those NFTs or keep them or whatever it was they wanted. They had a year to decide to trade in their token for the physical painting, or keep the NFT and have the painting burnt so it would only live on as a digital item. This project is called The Currency.

Can you remind me what an NFT is and tell me why you hate them? An NFT (non-fungible token) is a digital pointer that points at another thing and says who owns it. It has always been hard to monetize digital art and this seems like it could be the first step in solving that problem. I make a cool art on the interwebs and mint an NFT for it. I sell that NFT to you, and now you have ownership rights, although not necessarily the copyright. I can also build royalties into that NFT, so if you sell it, I get some of the profits, and you can bet Hirst has that built into his. This sounds great, so what’s the problem?

There is no guarantee that things on the internets will always be there. Digital assets are ephemeral. Ask anyone who had something cool on a floppy disc how that thing is doing now. Your pointer might be pointing at nothing is a few years.
Like a lot of areas in the art world, most people aren’t making much money. But some are, and it’s not usually the artists. It’s crypto investors! (Well, we’re gonna pretend that the crypto market hasn’t just taken a nosedive. I think crypto’s a scam, but other people really love it, so it’s possible it will go up again and the few people that were making money off it might make more.) Let’s say I am a dude with a large stake in a cryptocurrency. I own a ton of it. But things are only really worth money when you sell them, and I can’t sell my crypto because there aren’t enough buyers. How do I create buyers? Hmmm. There is this kind of famous artist offering up an NFT. I am gonna buy that NFT for A LOT of crypto. Because this piece sold for so much, we have created a new market and now lots of people want to see if they can make the same kind of moolah, especially since we hired celebrities to help whip up excitement. It costs artists crypto to mint their NFT. And it costs crypto for people to buy those NFTs. Everybody is buying crypto in order to participate in this hot market. And who are they buying it from? Me. And now I have US dollars instead of crypto. Which I can actually buy stuff with. Cool stuff.
NFTs are built on the blockchain and traded in cryptocurrency. CRYPTOCURRENCY IS A SYSTEM CONTROLLED BY 30-YEAR-OLD TECH BROS WHO LIVE IN THE BAHAMAS AND WORRY ABOUT THE POSSIBILITY OF AN AI APOCALYPSE INSTEAD OF ACCOUNTING RULES. This sort of thing leads to fraud it turns out.
damienhirst
A post shared by Damien Hirst (@damienhirst)

Okay, back to The Currency. I think that if you wondered what this work is about, it’s in the name. 5,149 were kept as physical paintings and 4,851, including Hirst’s, were burnt at the stake! Like a lot of his work, this is a spectacle about the art market. It sounds like a great fun idea to play with all this new NFT stuff, but it’s also an obvious cash grab. The tokens may not be fungible (interchangeable), but the paintings most definitely are; people were randomly assigned one upon purchase. But, like Jeff Koons, Hirst could not get away with this unless he had a willing audience. I know there were some people who thought this was a cool lark and were excited to participate. Other folks were happy to get a Hirst at such a cheap price. And then there were those who wanted to speculate on the NFT. Destroying art feels transgressive, it’s why some of the recent climate protesters are throwing soup at old masterworks. But Hirst strips this of real impact by burning crap. Who cares if these paintings go up in flames? They are barely even paintings. Transgression becomes spectacle becomes marketing material to get people to buy NFTs. For Hirst, art is currency, and I am not sure he makes anything anymore unless it furthers this idea. It’s fine. People love it. But at its heart, it’s just as boring and empty as what Koons does. They both have interesting ideas buried in their work, but it’s hard to see through the dollar signs. There’s room in the art world for all kinds of art; I just wish these guys were taking up less space. I am not saying that artists shouldn’t get paid, but art has the capacity to hold more meaning than what these artists and their collectors have in mind.

Simulation #1 Auction Final Update:

OUR ART FUND SIMULATION #1 IS OVER AND IT WAS SUPER FUN! To refresh your memory, 19 people bought 76 shares in the following Warhol/Kusama mashup print and then voted to try and flip it on eBay. We flipped it!:

Here are the details:

Our buyer is an epidemiologist and Kusama fan who lives in Jordan and was in Seattle for the holidays. They found out about my thesis project from my daughter’s Instagram - they are former co-workers. They are super cool, and I couldn’t be happier about how this all turned out. One thing I was taught in business school is that loose associations are as important as close friends when networking. Most job leads don’t come from your sister but from someone you just kind of know. I have not met all of the people participating in this business school simulation, but without those loose (and close) associations, I could not do this project.

Shares sold: $76
Listing Price: $110
Selling price: $177.50
Sales Tax: $17.93
Shipping: 0 (Buyer did local pickup)
Total: $195.43
eBay Fees: -$25.51 (eBay takes 12.9% of (item price + shipping + sales tax) + 30 cents.)
Remainder: $151.99 (I am going to round up to 152 for a reason you will see in a sec.)
Divided by the number of shares (76): $2

For every $1 the shareholders purchased, they received $2 back, which is a 100% return. In the real world, I would have charged the shareholders a ton of fees, but this is a simulation, so I didn’t. For perspective, the S&P 500 stock exchange averages around a 10% return. Generally speaking, if anybody guarantees you more than 15%, you should look at that investment vehicle hard for signs of fraud. But you know, rich people have different rules.

What was the purpose of all this besides fun? The contemporary art market is a network of people who come together to trade objects and money amongst themselves. By reflecting that activity through a simulation, we come together to create a different kind of network and a different kind of art. All of us - the people who subscribe to the newsletter or follow on Instagram and leave comments or participate in the activities - make this art happen. I am looking at the art market through a critical lens, but criticism can be a dead end unless there is space left for something better to happen. The art we make together is that better thing.

Next Month:

Our next simulaiton!!!!!!!!!!!! And some discussion of the new AI boom.

The PNW Conceptual Art Center (a conceptual art project)

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