When there is an artist who, in the best of gaming mood, puts what is hot on the market so that it sells en masse, it is Damien Hirst. It’s been a long time since he was still a young “Young British Artist” and caused a sensation with a shark in formaldehyde or offensively turned the memento mori idea into monetary value with his famous, diamond-studded skull cast.
Last year, when Hirst burned hundreds of colorful dot images from his own workshop for his project “The Currency” at the height of the NFT boom, which had collapsed in the meantime, it was about art as a commodity using the latest means, about the corresponding blockchain certificates for sale as originals. Dab to token: The resourceful Hirst, who is said to have made a fortune of more than 300 million pounds, is now turning the recycling of an old idea with new technical means into a business practice again. This time he is going back to his “Spin Paintings”, with which he took up the principle of the turntable painting popular in children’s rooms and at fairs from the mid-nineties.
He’s always had the knack
Paint is poured onto a rotating disc, mechanically randomly creating colorful radial patterns: the method is simple, the images it produces are incredibly flat, but Hirsts are still popular and plentiful on the secondary market for four to five-figure sums to have. Now the artist is following up on the HENI platform with works that look like the well-known centrifuge pictures, but which are based on the hottest tech trend of the year: artificial intelligence. The “buzz word” promises more revolutionary than it holds: Basically, you are dealing with a simple image generator whose creations are finally given an individual nonsense title by an AI chat program. The highlight of the matter: Hirst no longer even needs servants in the studio to do the work for him, computer systems take care of that – and the customer or art collector.
Because the lack of time increases desire, the clock is ticking: Since March 31st and until midnight in California on April 10th, anyone who wants to can design and order one of Hirst’s “beautiful paintings” at HENI.com/spins . All you have to do is select colors, a vortex style created by Hirst from options such as “Supernovas” or “Cyclones”, the screen shape – round or square – and the degree of blurring, and the machine spits out an image creation together with a uniquely thrown together title, such as “Beautiful, Rational Unsearchable Implosion Painting”. In XL that would cost 6000 dollars as a round picture printed on canvas, with a diameter of 23 centimeters it would cost 1500 dollars. An optional NFT, which can be purchased instead or in addition, costs 2,000 dollars.
It’s easy and catchy like painting Easter eggs and for Hirst it’s a money printing machine. “No matter how you feel, if you look at a ‘spin painting’ you can forget all the crap in your life, even if it’s just for a few seconds,” says Hirst. You can argue about that, maybe these pictures also symbolize some crap. But to exhibit turntable painting as the archetype of AI art, which instead of paint just takes image data through the wringer, that’s pretty awesome.
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