Damien Hirst burning his artwork (Image: Damien Hirst)
Damien Hirst burning his artwork (Image: Minnie Stephenson/Twitter)

Damien Hirst’s latest attention-grabbing art antic is burning hundreds of his paintings that he’d already sold. Is this a self-inflicted act of cultural vandalism? Perhaps, but there’s a method to the madness. 

Last year, Hirst launched the Currency, a collection of 10,000 non-fungible tokens (NFTs). The artist offered purchasers a choice: either they could choose to keep the unique, digital artwork (NFTs, unlike other digital objects, have specific ownership) or they could cash it in for a physical object. 

Of the buyers, 4581 decided they’d rather own the works in NFT form. So earlier this week Hirst, clad in a metallic silver boiler suit, began the process of destroying their physical counterparts by feeding them into a fire.

“A lot of people think I’m burning millions of dollars of art but I’m not,” Hirst told the BBC. “I’m completing the transformation of these physical artworks into NFTs by burning the physical versions.”

Hirst’s move is a well-established meme within the NFT community, many of whom believe that the digital asset is exactly the same as the physical asset. Just last month, a Mexican entrepreneur did the same thing with a Frida Kahlo sketch. A 2006 Bansky artwork was burnt in January. A crypto collective that bought an original copy of a rare art book version of Frank Herbert’s Dune for US$3 million because it mistakenly believed it would give it the rights to make a film adaptation — it’s a long story — originally planned to burn it too. 

Beyond a love of flashy stunts, the motivation for these burnings is that some NFT proponents believe that minting (lingo for creating) an NFT of a physical object means that the digital asset has all the value of the real world thing. 

There’s a kernel of truth in this. A collector’s baseball card isn’t valuable because of the ink and paper, it’s expensive because it’s rare and sought after. If you get rid of the ink and paper and make it into an NFT, it follows that it should have value. 

This rather extreme view doesn’t account for the fact that there can be value in an object’s physicality. While similar, they are not the same object. But last year, crypto artist Tascha put this to the test when she minted an NFT of a physical diamond that she bought for US$5000 and destroyed it.

Tascha’s NFT sold in September 2021 for 5.5 ether — about US$6600 today.