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Damien Hirst in his studio. The British artist’s third Hong Kong show will open at White Cube Hong Kong on November 24. Photo: White Cube / Damien Hirst

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
Art

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.”

10 highlights of the opening shows at M+ museum in Hong Kong

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.

We’ll get on to the NFTs. In real life, his latest show opens on November 24 at White Cube Hong Kong. Called “His Own Worst Enemy”, it’s a combination of paintings from his recent series “The Revelations” and, for the first time in Asia, several sculptures, including a Medusa head and a Mickey Mouse statue, from his 2017 Venice installation, “Treasures from the Wreck of the Unbelievable”.

That extravaganza, a decade in the planning and the subject of a Netflix documentary, included a barnacled Goofy and an ancient bust of Hirst supposedly dredged up from the ocean floor, among many other “discoveries”. As a mega-spectacle, it was considered either brilliant or grotesque, but no viewer left muttering “meh”.

Best Friends (2015) by Damien Hirst, part of his 2021 Hong Kong show “His Own Worst Enemy”. Photo: White Cube / Damien Hirst

Many of his shows have religious echoes – “Relics”, “Reverence”, “Cathedrals Built on Sand” – in which you can still glimpse the Catholic boy whose divorced mother left the church when he was 12.

Ever since, he’s been challenging human faith in certain institutions, including Big Pharma. Apart from his artistic pill cabinets, he used to have a restaurant actually called Pharmacy (the UK’s Royal Pharmaceutical Society accused him of misleading the public and there was talk of legal action). But yes, he says he’s vaccinated.

Has anyone ever told him that he is his own worst enemy? “Oh yeah, of course! A lot of galleries have said that to me. I like that. It implies there’s a war going on … I like the idea of war between the galleries and artists and the NFT world.”
The Severed Head of Medusa in bronze (2008) by Damien Hirst, part of his 2021 Hong Kong show “His Own Worst Enemy”. Photo: White Cube / Damien Hirst

This is his third Hong Kong outing (he won’t be attending – a pity as he claims he’s at his most polite when he meets strangers, especially on his travels). Although the previous two shows were at Gagosian, there’s no sign of impending warfare between bricks-and-mortar establishments: one of Gagosian’s London galleries is devoting itself to Hirst’s works for a year.

Meanwhile, his first museum exhibition in France, “Cherry Blossoms”, is on display at the Cartier Foundation for Contemporary Art in Paris until January, and earlier in November he closed a summer installation at the Borghese Gallery in Rome. He also has his own London gallery, the Newport Street Gallery. As ArtNews put it in June: “Damien Hirst’s Push For Global Domination Continues”.

Adumbration (2021) by Damien Hirst, part of his 2021 Hong Kong show “His Own Worst Enemy”. Photo: White Cube / Damien Hirst

Hirst laughs when that headline is read out to him. He knows how lucky he was with the timing of the pandemic. “If Covid had been five years before, in the middle of ‘Treasures’, with thousands of people all over the world fabricating things, that would have been screwed.” Instead, he had a quiet, assistant-less time in Devon, in southwest England, painting his cherry blossoms, while secretly plotting his next belief-busting project.

This time, it’s about the meaning of money. When his three sons – now 26, 21 and 16 – were younger and enmeshed within computer worlds, there were family discussions about finance.

“I tried to make a rule where you weren’t allowed to buy virtual things with real money. They said, ‘What about you booking helicopters with a credit card? Or you buying songs on iTunes? That’s not real.’ And my arguments fell apart. Money became flexible a long time ago.”

I’m not giving you the choice because I know the answer. I’m giving you the choice because I don’t know the answer
Hirst on his NFT project The Currency

In February, he announced on Instagram he was selling prints of “The Virtues” and added that, for the first time, he was accepting cryptocurrency. “It’s hard for us to trust anything in this life but somehow we manage it,” he wrote. By March, he was unveiling “The Currency”, “the most exciting project I have ever worked on by far”, he told HENI.

The project consists of 10,000 NFTs, corresponding to 10,000 multicoloured-spot works that were created on A4-sized paper in 2016. Originally, each took its name from song lyrics that Hirst liked.

“But I was worried someone would sue me – you know, that Paul McCartney would say ‘‘Hello’ is my word, not yours.’” So he fed the words into a computer, which scrambled them into 10,000 gnomic utterances such as “This feels a bit like big light” and “See the forest in the eyes”, assigned each one as a title for his NFTs, and they went on sale for US$2,000 each.
One of Hirst’s 2016 multicoloured-spot works that were turned into NFTs for The Currency. Photo: Damien Hirst

Naturally, in Hirstworld there’s a twist. Before July 27, 2022, the owners will have to make a choice between paper or NFT, real-life or digital art. The unchosen option will be destroyed. As a PR strategist, Hirst could teach Sun Tzu a thing or two: this is the war of art and the conflict is already playing with owners’ minds. One Hongkonger says he’s turned down an offer of US$52,000 for his, that it’s caused more arguments in his relationship than any other topic and that he’s already having sleepless nights about his July 27 decision deadline.

“It’s an interesting experiment to see what happens,” Hirst says. He’s grinning, like an imp with a massive human laboratory at his disposal. The official name of his company, after all, is Science.

“Basically, there’s polarity, which I love. I get drawn to it like a magnet. I’m not giving you the choice because I know the answer. I’m giving you the choice because I don’t know the answer.”

Dead Woman (2012) by Damien Hirst, part of his 2021 Hong Kong show “His Own Worst Enemy”. Photo: White Cube / Damien Hirst

Whatever your opinion, it’s hard to disagree when he holds up his mobile phone and states, “More and more people live on these. If you go up to an art collector and ask them what they’ve bought recently, they get their phones out. We’re not looking at paintings any more, we’re looking at phones. And NFTs are perfect.”

He lives, of course, within a moneyed cocoon (those helicopters). You couldn’t exactly describe him as humble but the distance travelled is always present. He’d just been in Rome for the end of his Borghese Gallery exhibition and, again unprompted, marvels at the juxtaposition of the city’s ancient statues with his faux “Treasures” and the sheer unbelievability of it.

“I used to go there as a student and draw things. I never, ever thought I’d make work that would look at home there. I thought, how the hell did that happen?”

It has to be said the White Cube works look distinctly black. Maybe that’s his love of polarity at play again. Death hovers around the show’s edges, less and less impossible with each passing year. He says he’s just having fun, he looks as if he’s having fun, but is it still at the same level? “Yeah! The only time I didn’t have fun was when I was drinking way too much, at the very end.”

Bell (Bo) (2011) by Damien Hirst, part of his 2021 Hong Kong show “His Own Worst Enemy”. Photo: White Cube / Damien Hirst

The drinking stopped in 2006 but he surely knows that a compulsion – bigger! better! more! – nests within him, his own worst enemy. If politeness is his virtue, what’s his vice?

“Oh.”

Hirst pauses for an uncharacteristically long time. Eventually: “Addiction. Is that a vice? I guess it’s greed. But it’s more destructive than just greed. I would always think if you can have one drink, and it makes you happy, imagine what it would be like to have two? Double that if you have four, double that if you have eight … it doesn’t stop.”

His Own Worst Enemy is at White Cube Hong Kong from November 24 to January 8, 2022

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