Damien Hirst’s new AI project, which asked collectors to create their own paintings, earned him $20 million in nine days

The Beautiful Paintingsby Damien Hirst most recent project of AI-generated worksproved a lucrative venture for the British artist and his tech collaborator, HENI. During a nine-day sale that ended on April 10, Hirst sold 5,508 paintings (5,109 physical artworks and 399 NFTs) and generated $20.9 million in revenue.

The project is a digital remix of Hirst Rotation Paintings 1990s and outsourced considerable creativity to collectors, albeit channeled through artificial intelligence.

Using the HENI dashboard, collectors could determine the colors, style, size and shape of the artwork they wanted to generate. The Beautiful Paintings claimed to push the boundaries of art and wow people, although in reality the experience of clicking HENI was reminiscent of customizing a pair of sneakers on NikeID in the early 2010s.

Damien Hirt, The Beautiful Paintings (2023). Photo: Prudence Cuming Associates Ltd.

Either way, collectors went big The Beautiful Paintingsliterally.

The largest size offered for Hirst’s squares and circles (extra-large, 100 cm in diameter) was the most lucrative, generating $11.6 million. Circles were also found to be nearly three times more popular than squares, and physical works more popular than digital – less than 10% of works created were NFTs.

This point about the enduring popularity of physical works was proven somewhat in Hirst’s previous project straddling the line of physical and digital art: 2021’s Currency. Collectors received a physical and digital version of the same work, then were forced to engrave one. The majority chose to ditch their NFT for the physical Hirst.

Nonetheless, the project earned the artist more than $89 million, according to his book on the collection, Currency: Chronicles.

Since he first came to the attention of the art world in the late 1980s as part of the Young British Artists, Hirst’s work is now seen by collectors as a valuable investment. Somewhat perversely, Hirst was one of his biggest collectors, courting controversy by engaging in unusual market practices such as buy back one’s own joban act that some have called market manipulation.

Despite this criticism, as evidenced The Beautiful Paintingshis work continues to attract collectors or investors, if you’re cynical.

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