If it weren’t for the digital age, we wouldn’t be able to achieve such great things so quickly.

Can Damien Hirst create his own virtual currency bank? The Currency,” a series of dots priced at 220,000 yen ($2,000), was created with the concept of “The Currency” (market value 2.2 billion yen). *For more details, please refer to the following.

If you choose NFT, the real picture is discarded; if you choose real, the NFT is discarded. They will announce at a later date what the buyer did with this ruthless choice. Damien said, “What if everyone chooses NFT!” He says jokingly.

Currently, there are 1,636 Damian pieces on the marketplace called Opensea (a leading platform for NFT art), as of September 4.

While the selling price in primary (primary distribution such as galleries) is 220,000 yen, it has been offered in secondary (secondary distribution such as auctions) for about 6.02 million yen (14 Ethereum = 430,000 yen) in less than two months after its release, and the winning bid is about 3 million yen (7 Ethereum). The price is 14 times higher than the purchase price.

What is interesting here is that we are not talking about value from the art collector’s side, but I thought about what NFT art looks like from the investor’s side.

16% of the total production (coins issued) is already in circulation at the NFT. (It is probably more than 20% in reality, since it is probably out there outside of Opensea.)

Digital is easier to distribute than analog. If this were a Christie’s or Sotheby’s auction (secondary), it would take more time to prepare for sale. But with NFT, it can be put up for secondary (resale) in an instant in a digital marketplace such as Opensea.

Damien Hirst’s “The Currency” has already sold more than 1,600 pieces, which has created a stable “market” for investors. This is important, because investors other than art lovers cannot understand the quality and value of the art, since they can only understand the absolute value of a single piece of NFT art. Therefore, something that could be priced at 1 yen or 100 million yen has no price because there is no market price for it. In other words, it has no value.

Money is originally issued by the state to create trust and circulating value. This is the structure of the market. In El Salvador, the president decided to change the reserve currency to the bitcoin because the people had been using the U.S. dollar since the local currency had not been used for a long time.

Let’s get back to the story.

The resale value of the real Damien work is unknown because the real painting has not yet been delivered to the buyer, but it will be interesting to compare whether the real or the digital painting will be worth more in a few years. I own two of them, by the way. I have two of them, one digital and one analog.

In order for NFT art to have citizenship in the future, it is essential for it to be creative with a great concept, but the key is to be able to create a “market” for the work that accompanies it.

◆Reference Articles

Damien Hirst confronts the ultimate choice between NFT art and real art (July 19, 2021)

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