Reports said that leading contemporary artist Damien Hirst’s non-fungible token (NFT) drop named “The Currency” has been oversubscribed by more than six times.
It has been reported that the NFT drop consists of 10,000 unique colorful dot pattern artworks with a corresponding NFT for each piece. Applications for the NFT drop closed on Thursday, and Heni Group, which hosted the sale, revealed that 32,472 people applied for a total of 67,023 NFTs, which means many applications will either be scaled back or unsuccessful, given there are only 10,000 NFTs available.
However, many collectors will now have to seek out the NFTs on secondary markets.
The report said that the NFTs were priced at $2,000 each, and the drop included an interesting feature, as the artist is giving collectors one year to decide if they would like to burn the NFT in exchange for the original artwork, or keep the NFT and destroy the original artwork.
Likewise, the world-renowned artist first entered the crypto space back in February this year after he started accepting payments in Bitcoin and Ether for artworks from a collection of cherry blossom-themed paintings. In his new NFT venture, the artist is exploring the concept of value behind money and art, in which he asserted their value is determined by social phenomena such as faith and trust. To loosely depict money in the artworks, there is a holographic image of Hirst in each piece and a signature on the back, along with small individual messages to represent a serial number.
Hirst said in a video:
“I’ve never really understood money. It’s like you look at money, in its basic form, [...] all these things, art, money commerce, they’re all ethereal.”
He added that he would “love it” if a collector were able to use the artwork as actual currency due to its value as an NFT. However, he thinks that most people will choose to keep the artwork.
Hirst further stated that he thinks digital art forms, such as NFTs, will outlive physical art galleries, as he noted that NFTs depicting “good artwork” can be easily experienced anywhere.
Thus, he said:
“I think that digital art is probably going to last a lot longer than galleries. I mean, you probably won’t be going into galleries. We’ll be sitting in bars showing each other what we’ve recently bought on our phones, and that’s kind of what we do now.”
Source: Cointelegraph | Image: Paper Mag