An Art Collective Cut Up a $30,000 Damien Hirst Spot Print. The Leftover Bits of Paper Just Sold for $261,000

Last week, a collective of
artists and designers called MSCHF cut up a Damien Hirst spot print
and sold each of the 88
individual spots for $480 each. They then put up for auction what
remained of the original $30,000 print: a piece of paper filled
with holes and bearing Hirst’s signature. That new work, titled
88 Holes, just sold for $261,400—more than eight and half
times its original value as a work by Hirst.

As much as the feat reads as an
indictment of the very market the project cheekily critiqued, the
members of the MSCHF were actually encouraged by the
sale.

“I’d like to say that it’s a
hopeful sign that the art market still has hunger for innovation,
and that, as much as buyers reward artists for churning out the
same thing year-over-year, there’s still room to branch out,” says
Kevin Wiesner, a creative director at MSCHF. 

The work, a Banksy-esque blend
of between highbrow conceptual art and low-brow internet
tomfoolery, was intended as a comment on fractionalized art
investment and the hyper-speculative nature of the
market. 

“Art valuation is largely a
function of attention,” Wiesner says. “One way to do that is beat
buyers over the head with a style over and over until it’s
recognizable enough—the Spots basic strategy—but another is to dramatically
break with the usual—our iconoclastic gambit.”

Over the course of the 10-day
online auction, 88
Holes brought in just
under 20 bids, a representative for the group says. The 88 spots
cut from the Hirst print, which were priced at $480 a pop, sold out
in under a minute—bringing the project’s total revenue to more than
$300,000. 

“The truest irony, perhaps, has
been watching people flip their individual spots on eBay for three,
four, and five times the selling price—even before we’d shipped
them,” says Wiesner.

Indeed, a quick scan of the
online auction site shows that there are at least a dozen spots
available for resale, listed next to other sought-after products
from the collective’s previous drops, including a chicken-shaped
bong and pairs of Nike sneakers with holy water from the River
Jordan in the soles.

The spots range in price on the
site from $1,000 to $3,500.

The post An Art Collective Cut Up a $30,000 Damien Hirst
Spot Print. The Leftover Bits of Paper Just Sold for $261,000
appeared first on artnet News.