English artist Damien Hirst’s latest project, Coin, is a work of art in two forms. Its physical form is 10,000 hand-drawn A4 sheets covered in colored dots. As with paper money, each note contains a hologram of Hirst, a signature, a small dot, and instead of a serial number, a small individual message.
The second part of the artwork is that each of these hand-drawn sheets has a corresponding NFT (non-fungible token). NFTs are digital certificates of ownership that reside on secure online ledgers known as blockchains.
The way the “currency” works is that collectors will not buy the physical artwork immediately. Instead, they will pay US$2,000 (£1,458) for an NFT, and then have a year to decide whether they want the digital or physical version. Once the Collector chooses one, the other will be destroyed.
So, what’s going on here, and what does it tell us about art and money?
What is money?
Hirst essentially created a variety of money, on the rationale that money is primarily a social phenomenon built on faith and trust. In doing so, he addresses an interesting paradox. “Non-fungible” means that the token is used once. This is in contrast to fungible items like the dollar, which are all the same and can be traded similarly – in the same way that many cryptocurrencies like ether or dogecoin are traded. According to traditional economics, fungibility is one of the basic properties of any currency.
But is this what it seems? By creating 10,000 individual units that mimic real coins, Hirst highlights through each work’s unique markings that even fungible coins have some non-fungible characteristics – for example, most coins will have different serial numbers and dates of issue on each note. This helps to emphasize that money is a concept that becomes difficult to define when you look at it more closely.
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This work also challenges our sense of what money is by raising questions about another of its fundamental properties—its medium of exchange. The work of a famous artist is rarely viewed as a means of exchange. Instead, it will typically be treated as a rare store of value, like gold.
Hirst wonders if it’s really that way. By producing 10,000 coin-style works, he clearly enjoys showing how money is malleable and can change shape depending on the context.
What is art?
What is more important, physical or digital art? Hirst is not the first to ask this question in the context of NFTs. A few months ago, a company called Injective Protocol purchased a 2006 Banksy artwork titled Morons, which parodies an art auction, for US$95,000. She then burned the piece directly on Twitter so that only a digital copy remained on the NFT. She then sold the NFT for US$380,000.
I’ve previously discussed how the folks at Injective cleverly decided to play on our preference for the physical over the digital. By destroying the physical copy and then claiming that the NFT signature would replace the artwork, he drew attention to the benefit of the NFT not being able to be destroyed by vandals like themselves.
At a time when there has been an explosion in demand for NFT artwork and other collectibles, with some trading hands worth millions of pounds, this was a commentary on the ongoing question of whether NFTs really equate to ownership. For many, the mystery is why someone would feel that owning a digital copy rather than an “actual” work of art constitutes ownership at all.
Hirst clearly understands this. He approaches the question of property by abstracting it from its purest economic and commercial form—that of the work of art as money. When people express their confusion about NFTs, what they really mean is how can you spend money on something that has no value? The idea that digital ownership is equivalent to physical ownership is still unacceptable to the majority of people.
What Hirst highlights is how the “puzzle” can be easily solved by realizing that there are two communities interested in his artwork: those who appreciate his traditional physical pieces and those who appreciate his NFT pieces. I think he does this to show how a value never makes sense when it is removed from the cultural community that assigned that value to it. Each society is a mystery to the other. However, when you zoom out, they are closer than they imagined, and they eventually bond as Hearst fans.
For most people, the mystery still lies in the NFT community. This culture is populated by passionate blockchain enthusiasts and crypto natives, which are young people who have grown up with cryptocurrencies. For them, a blockchain wallet stores their value. This could mean fungible currencies like bitcoin or ether, but also more and more of their technical collection. These groups represent their tastes and interests and tell us a little about who they are and what they value.
A particularly clear example is the person who, a year later, decided to claim an NFT of a Hirst work and reject a physical copy. What better move to signal commitment to the future of blockchain? When the year is over and we see how many people have chosen to hold NFTs, it may give an interesting indication of how dominant this new digital generation has become.
