Damien Hirst’s New Project Lets Buyers Generate Their Own “Spin” NFTs

Revolution (of art) can be randomized. The British mega-artist Damien Hirt has launched a tech-heavy new take on its splashy three-decade-old Rotation paintings.

It is called The Beautiful Paintings and allows collectors use an app dashboard—developed with art and technology services company Heni—to order a non-fungible token (NFT), minted on the Ethereum blockchain, make it round or square, and have it printed or not, in one of four sizes. All without a hint of turntable or paint splatter that characterized Hirst’s Spin collaborations with musician David Bowie-shaped Beautiful, hello, space-boy painting (1995)—and others. The “drop”, during which buyers will be able to generate and buy the NFTs, runs until April 10.

A project brief describes The Beautiful Paintings as “a radical movement to push the boundaries of digital and physical artistic creation”.

Buyers can use the “Spin Generator” on the Beautiful Paintings dashboard to choose from a menu of styles and colors. The sample color names were created using machine learning – the organizing and categorization technology that also underpins artificial intelligence – which generated the terms Himalayan Waters, Cracked Grass, Interdimensional Cloud, Dolphin’s Whiskers, Tangerine Pine and others. The spin painting styles offered, 25 in all, include names reminiscent of climatic phenomena – vapors, whirlpools, bursting rivers and cyclones – or of outer space – comets, star clusters and nebulae. On the “Colors” and “Rotation Style” panels of the application, there is a “Randomize” button.

The randomization feature has been included to replicate the fleeting and unpredictable nature of Hirst Spin paints and to ensure that two NFTs generated by the dashboard will not be identical. The final part of the randomization is the “fun and descriptive” naming of the finished work, using more machine learning, this time sitting on a neural network (something wired to mimic how a human or animal brain works) . Each randomly generated name will start with the word “Beautiful” and end with the word “Painting”.

“The model allows for an endless variety of new and unreleased titles,” according to the project’s press release, “that follow the format of [Hirst’s] existing Rotation Paintings.”

The NFTS are priced at $2,000 each and the prints (signed by Hirst) – made after using an algorithm to enlarge the digital file to ultra-high resolution – range from $1,500 to $6,000. A selection of printed works is presented at the Heni Gallery in London’s Soho until April 10.

“I called the series ‘The Beautiful Paintings’ for obvious reasons,” Hirst announced on Twitter.

• Damien Hirst: The beautiful paintingsuntil April 10, Heni Gallery, London