Briefly
- Artist Damien Hirst is accepting Bitcoin and Ethereum for a brand new batch of prints.
- The items are impressed by bushidō, the samurai code.
Damien Hirst—the British artist recognized for his preserved shark piece, The Bodily Impossibility of Dying within the Thoughts of Somebody Residing—has stated he’s now taking Bitcoin and Ethereum as fee for a brand new run of prints.
“For the primary time, I’m accepting Cryptocurrency for fee,” he wrote on Instagram. “It’s onerous for any of us to belief something on this life however one way or the other we handle it and we even discover love and I like artwork and I like the crypto world and I’m blissful and proud to place my perception into Bitcoin (BTC) and Ether (ETH) and settle for them for this drop.”
And although you may pay for them in crypto, these items are very a lot not “crypto artwork”—the eight prints signify completely different takes on cherry blossoms, impressed by the eight virtues of bushidō, the samurai code. They cost $3,000 a pop, and so they’re solely on sale till March 3.
The Bodily Impossibility of Dying within the Thoughts of Somebody Residing put Hirst on the map within the 90s, and although he’s been producing much less essential work over time, his artwork stays polarizing as ever; a 2017 exhibition in Venice was met with each raves and pans.
The large story on the proverbial “intersection of artwork and know-how” over the previous few months has beenNFTs (non-fungible tokens): cryptographically secured belongings that may put any type of digital artwork on the Ethereum blockchain. In response to a report from the blockchain analytics agency NonFungible, the market grew by 2800% final yr.
Earlier as we speak, musician and visible artist (and girlfriend to billionaire Elon Musk) Grimes sold a collection of NFTs for over $6 million.
And whereas NFTs are usually on-line photos and animations, bodily artworks can include NFT parts too. In October, Christie’s sold a Bitcoin-themed piece with an accompanying NFT for $131,000.
For now, although, Hirst’s prints stay off-chain.
