Damien Hirst Is No Longer Making His Signature Spin Paintings. Instead, He’s Unveiled a New A.I. Generator So You Can Make Them Yourself

There’s a scene in the vintage Woody Allen movie Hannah and Her Sisters in which a surly artist lectures a nouveau riche customer that he doesn’t market paintings “by the yard” or “to blend in with the sofa.” Very well, Damien Hirst does.

Enter The Stunning Paintings, Hirst’s most recent foray into the realm of NFTs that riffs off his celebrated Spin Paintings from the 1990s, in which the British artist dribbled paint from on leading of a ladder onto rotating canvases. Vivid colour endures, but the new is effective are flat and specific, with the serendipity of motion and gravity handed above to a generative algorithm. The reasoning powering series’ name is self-obvious, Hirst announced on Twitter.

A operate produced by The Gorgeous Paintings by Damien Hirst. Photo: Prudence Cuming Associates Ltd.

Would-be collectors are directed to a dashboard on HENI, the arts and technology enterprise that is at present serving as Hirst’s main digital collaborator, where they can crank out their have portray. The menu permits end users to decide on up to 12 hues, one of 25 spin variations, blurring, and the canvas condition (square or round). Those a lot more inclined to relinquish imaginative regulate to Hirst’s machine can randomize the total system. And why not? They are all stunning.

Once people have generated a painting, they can have the get the job done generated as a physical piece, an NFT, or equally. Actual physical is effective appear in four sizes ranging from 24 cm to 100 cm in diameter and have Hirst’s signature scrawled in paint pen. Canvases vary in rate from $1,500 to $6,000, and an NFT minted on the Ethereum blockchain prices $2,000.

A operate produced by The Lovely Paintings by Damien Hirst. Image: Prudence Cuming Associates Ltd.

“I have often believed that all the things carried out properly is artwork and there are no boundaries,” Hirst stated in a assertion. “For me, The Attractive Paintings and the Spin Paintings are about that. No boundaries. Artwork that would make you go, ‘wow!’ And you can get misplaced in it.”

With The Lovely Paintings, Hirst is also demonstrating an urge for food to capitalize on the most up-to-date buzzwords of a tech-fuelled art instant (equipment studying, generative artwork, NFTs).

Equipment learning was employed to develop the sample coloration names—indigo blue is Blueberry Brûlée, purple is Ego, forest inexperienced is Mountain Man—and to deliver long, nonsensical artwork titles. The algorithm inserts descriptives in between the terms “Beautiful” and “Painting” to create titles this sort of as “Beautiful Incredibly Undigested Painting,” “Beautiful Ennobled Portray,” or “Beautiful Pricey And Welcome Implosion Portray.”

Damien Hirst with The Lovely Paintings. Image: Prudence Cuming Associates Ltd.

“I wanted to do something that’s purely generative,” the artist additional. “Without working with paint, canvas, or pencils and paper, I was energized to see if we could make something that generated excellent-looking Spin Paintings that weren’t in the real globe.”

The Lovely Paintings by Damien Hirst operates via April 10 on HENI.

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