Damien Hirst on his NFT art The Currency, Hong Kong show and the war between digital and physical worlds
- The British artist is drawn ‘like a magnet’ to the polarity his 10,000-piece NFT series is creating, where buyers must choose either physical or digital works
- ‘His Own Worst Enemy’, which opens at White Cube Hong Kong on November 24, includes for the first time in Asia pieces from his divisive 2017 Venice installation
Earlier this year, British artist Damien Hirst created “The Virtues”, a series of cherry blossom prints each named after one of the eight virtues of bushido – Japan’s old samurai code. Which is his favourite? “I like politeness,” he says, on a video call from his London studio. This is such an unexpected answer that he pulls out his phone, politely, to confirm it’s on the bushido list and, yes, it’s between mercy and honesty.
“Politeness seems to be the weakest but there’s incredible strength in it,” he says. Hirst loves apparent contradictions and he loves conversational riffing so he begins musing: “A good example of that is if somebody said, being critical, that my diamond skull is very ‘decorative’ – I like that! When you’re dealing with death, decoration is the only powerful tool you have against it. I think politeness is another thing we do in the face of doubts and confusion.”
You will have noted the unprompted skull reference. Many famous artists, bored with the stranglehold of their youthful success, prefer to focus on their latest work. Hirst, however, owns it all simultaneously – past, present and, emphatically, future.
At the moment, he’s into non-fungible tokens, or NFTs. When Heni, an online art marketplace with which he appears to have a close association, did a graph of his recent NFT turnover, Hirst, now 56, joined up the dots and retweeted it as a shark. Incredibly, it’s 30 years since he stuck one in a tank of formaldehyde and named it The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living.