A year-long project is pitting traditional paintings against non-fungible tokens. Which is more valuable—a painting, or an NFT?

Last summer, Damien Hirst paired thousands of unique dot paintings with corresponding NFTs, which he put up for sale for just $2,000 each. The catch? The owner would have to choose, by summer 2022, whether to keep the NFT or trade it in for the physical canvas copy. The version not selected would be destroyed.

Now, with 10,000 pieces sold, the results are in:

• A majority of buyers, 5,149, chose to keep their physical art
• while 4,851 opted for NFTs. 

Hirst’s project, called “The Currency,” has reached its final phase: The real-life pieces that buyers rejected in favour of corresponding NFTs will be burned one by one this fall.

The experiment “explores the boundaries of art and currency—when art changes and becomes a currency, and when currency becomes art,” writes HENI, the art-tech company that ran the sales last summer, on its website.

Platforms like Sandbox and Decentraland, Meta enable investors to buy land as an NFT, which can be developed with virtual buildings or experiences or resold on secondary markets like NFT exchange OpenSea. 

Companies like Warner Music Group, Atari, Samsung, and Adidas have all bought digital land, a move that Cuban, based on his latest comments, appears unlikely to follow.

Cuban also isn’t buying the central claim of metaverse land speculators that scarcity will make these digital plots valuable. 

“It’s not even as good as a URL or an ENS, because there’s unlimited volumes that you can create,” he said during the YouTube interview.

Despite being an investor in Yuga Labs, the owner of popular NFT collections Bored Ape Yacht Club and CryptoPunks, Cuban said he was not a fan of the company’s land sale, which raised about $317 million for its metaverse platform Otherside in April.

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