day 3 of the Sidetracks And Detours Lowry Festival: L.S. LOWRY:   GOING TO THE MATCH

Norman Warwick:     compares and contrasts.

In our cemi-detached home on leafy Nursery Road in Prestwich, mum and dad had anA4 size sketch framed on the living room wall. Mum had picked it up for threepence at Bury Market because she liked the simple drawing of a sail boat on the water depicted in no more than half a dozen lines. Dad got it into his head that the sketch was ´definitely a Lowry´ and would one day be worth thousands of pounds. Of course it wasn´t a Lowry (I don´t think), but it mysteriously disappeared when dad died, so maybe mum or my brother Graham know a lot more about art that I do.

There is no doubt these days that Lowry´s authenticated works  are worth thousands of pounds as dad predicted. In fact, Going To The Match, (left) previously owned by The Players Foundation, is now being sold to raise money for the new body.

A spokesperson for the Players Foundation said: “We are very proud that we have been able to make sure the British public have had the opportunity to enjoy such a wonderful piece of footballing memorabilia and art.

“The Players Foundation no longer has any income guaranteed, so we have had to completely reposition the charity. The trustees recognise the current financial crisis means we need all the income we can obtain, and all our assets have to work for us to ensure our ongoing work.

“We want to continue to provide, amongst other things, benevolent grants to those in real financial need, and assist people with dementia. This has led us to the inevitable decision that the Lowry has to be sold in the interests of our beneficiaries.”

The current record price for a Lowry is held jointly by another football painting, The Football Match (right) , which sold for £5.6m in May 2011, and a painting of Piccadilly Circus, which also sold for £5.6m six months later.

They stream towards the turnstiles, stick-like figures instantly familiar to anyone who has looked at a painting by LS Lowry.

In the foreground, their coats and hats are distinct. In the background, beneath the tall chimneys of a long-gone heavy industry, the people are a blur. But all of them have a common purpose: going to the match.

Next month, the painting by one of Britain’s best known and best loved painters, is set to smash records when it is put up for sale to raise money for a charity that helps professional football players.

Going to the Match, painted by Lowry in 1953, is expected to fetch up to £8m. It was last sold in 1999, when the Professional Footballers Association (PFA), the union for current and former players, paid £1.9m.

Lowry only took up painting full-time after retiring from his job as a rent collector in 1952. Before that, he generally painted late at night after his mother, with whom he lived, had gone to bed. A modest and reserved man, he turned down five separate state honours during his lifetime, including a knighthood in 1968.

The artist, famous for his industrial scenes in the north-west of England in the mid-20th century, produced a number of football paintings, of which Going to the Match is the best known.

“What they’re really about is humanity,” said Nick Orchard, head of modern British and Irish art at Christie’s, which is auctioning the painting in London next month.

“Going to the Match is about emotion, excitement, the crowd gathering, the group experience. In the industrial north-west, most workers in the mills would probably do a five-and-a-half-day week, clock off lunchtime on Saturday, off to the match Saturday afternoon, and that was the beginning of their break from working life.

“Lowry was a great observer of people, particularly within the industrial landscape, and these football matches really captured the essence of what Lowry was trying to get to in his paintings.”

The stadium in the painting was Burnden Park, the home of Bolton Wanderers, close to Lowry’s home in Pendlebury. (The artist was, however, a lifelong supporter of Manchester City.) Thirty-three fans were crushed to death at Burnden Park in 1946 in one of the worst stadium disasters of the last century. It was demolished in 1999, and the site is now a retail park.

As well as the crowds flocking to the turnstiles, the painting shows crowded terraces inside the stadium, and surrounding terraced homes as well as the factories in the background. “He’s packed it all in,” said Orchard.

When the PFA paid £1.9m, more than four times the estimate, for Going to the Match in 1999, Gordon Taylor, then chief executive, said it was “quite simply the finest football painting ever.” It would be the PFA’s “prized possession”, he added.

Earlier this year, the PFA’s charitable arm became a separate body, the Players Foundation, under a reorganisation prompted by a warning from the Charity Commission. It helps players and former players with matters including education, pensions, health and legal issues.

Going to the Match, which has been on display at The Lowry in Salford since 2000, is now being sold to raise money for the new body.

A spokesperson for the Players Foundation said: “We are very proud that we have been able to make sure the British public have had the opportunity to enjoy such a wonderful piece of footballing memorabilia and art.

“The Players Foundation no longer has any income guaranteed, so we have had to completely reposition the charity. The trustees recognise the current financial crisis means we need all the income we can obtain, and all our assets have to work for us to ensure our ongoing work.

“We want to continue to provide, amongst other things, benevolent grants to those in real financial need, and assist people with dementia. This has led us to the inevitable decision that the Lowry has to be sold in the interests of our beneficiaries.”

The current record price for a Lowry is held jointly by another football painting, The Football Match, which sold for £5.6m in May 2011, and a painting of Piccadilly Circus, which also sold for £5.6m six months later.

However, since we began putting this LS Lowry festival together a few weeks ago, about his piece and the proposed auction, a furious disagreement has broken out. CNN report that what has been described as “quite simply the finest football painting ever” and is estimated to fetch up to $9 million at auction today, the sale of L.S. Lowry’s “Going to the Match” could see the much-loved artwork disappear from public display.

The 1953 painting, which depicts crowds of Lowry’s trademark, matchstick-style figures heading to a football stadium in the northwest of England, is up for auction on October 19, potentially putting an end to its 22-year residence at the Lowry museum in Salford.

The impending sale has stoked fears in the art community and beyond about the picture’s future, so much so that the Mayor of Salford has appealed to wealthy football clubs and players to purchase the painting and keep it in the public eye.

“There’s a very real risk that the work will come off public exhibition, and there’s a real risk that it might leave the country as well,” Michael Simpson, director of visual art at the Lowry, tells CNN.

The painting is expected to be sold for between $5.5 and $9 million (£5-8 million) at auction, according to Christie’s, and Simpson hopes a temporary export ban might ensure the work stays remains in the UK after it’s sold.

In such an instance, an independent committee would review the painting and advise the UK government on whether it is considered a national treasure and deemed “too important to leave the UK.”

Many feel that England’s northwest is a natural home for “Going to the Match” and its nostalgic depiction of crowds flocking to a football game.

The diminutive figures in the painting are heading to Burnden Park – the former, and now demolished, home of Bolton Wanderers – against the backdrop of factory chimneys and a grey, clouded sky.

A far cry from the billion-dollar industry of today’s Premier League, it provides a snapshot of what English football was like in the middle of the 20th century when spectators would head to matches straight from work on a Saturday.

“It’s probably the best football painting ever, in my opinion,” Mick Kirkbride, a London-based artist featured in the Football Art Prize exhibition, tells CNN.

“It just evokes everything about that release on a Saturday – going in your hoards and your bands and your tribes to that cathedral. And then the industrial backdrop says everything about where the game was born and where it flourished.”

Painted when Lowry was at the peak of his powers, “Going to the Match” – like much of the artist’s work – has grown in popularity in recent decades.

Today, nearly 50 years after his death, he is celebrated for his honest depictions of ordinary people leading ordinary lives.

Using a restricted and largely monochrome palette, Lowry captured brooding, industrial scenes around Manchester and Salford, amassing a prolific body of work over the course of his artistic career

He produced several works that focus on sporting events, but “Going to the Match” is the most renowned – as the painting’s estimated price tag would suggest.

“For northern, working-class people who like to look at paintings, it’s our Mona Lisa, really,” says Kirkbride. “For football fans it’s iconic … You can’t think of many iconic football paintings.”

The picture was bought by the Professional Footballers’ Association (PFA) – the union representing football players in England and Wales – in 1999 when then-CEO Gordon Taylor called it “quite simply the finest football painting ever.”

But the PFA is now having to sell the painting to fund its charitable work, which includes assisting ex-football players living with dementia.

The Mayor of Salford has launched a campaign for a temporary export ban to be attached to “Going to the Match” and wrote a letter imploring “[people] of means” to buy the painting and help keep it on public display in the city.

“It’s taken on its iconic status over the last 20-odd years when it’s been seen in public,” says Simpson, who thinks the Lowry museum has a “really good case” to continue displaying the painting after its sale.

“When it was in a private collection before that, relatively few people would know about it. But having it on public display has turned it into an icon and has increased its value significantly.”

The Lowry is a 15-minute walk from Manchester United’s Old Trafford stadium and benefits from increased footfall when the club has home games as a pre-match meeting point for fans.

“Loads of people come, they’ll have something to eat in our cafe and they’ll get a few drinks in the bar,” says Simpson. “They’ll go up and have a look at the painting, or they’ll just meet up with people before they go on to the match.”

But Simpson believes the upcoming World Cup in Qatar could incentivize overseas collectors to try and buy “Going to the Match,” and Kirkbride expects the painting to sell for more than its valuation given Lowry’s growing popularity.

“It’s the commodification of art versus the cultural heritage – it’s a clash of two ideologies,” says Kirkbride. “Art’s a commodity, art’s currency. There’s a hard market going on out there … It’s very, very cutthroat.”

Whatever the outcome of the auction, efforts from the past few weeks to keep the painting on display in the UK are testament to Lowry’s artistic legacy and football’s nostalgic appeal.

“Anybody who’s been to a football match can see themselves in that picture because it’s more about the shared experience of seeing a match together and coming together at the match,” says Simpson. “Lowry captures it wonderfully in that work.”

Whether or not the painting is withdrawn from auction today or remains on sale and breaks records it will always be Lowry´s depiction of Going To The ´Match, along with his other works, that lay at the back of my mind as Colin Lever, my Lendanear song-writing partner, and I (left) wrote Cup Finals Every Night.

It was a simple poem about my memories of playing football in the street as a kid. It spoke of how we would even play out in the dark in Cedar Grove, a cul de sac with no vehicles really, off Nursery Road. We pretended that ´lamp-posts were Wembley´s brightest floodlights.´  I wrote about how there could be anything up to fifteen lads each side and how half time would be taken when one team had scored ten. I wrote of how Aunty Heap, as I called my poor neighbour who lived in the grove, would on some nights, (usually when Corrie was on telly) would stand on her kitchen step screaming what´s all this noise and sometimes would even come out and tackle someone and pick up the ball and take it back in the house with her. I spoke of how I would always be Francis Lee, a player who became a self-made million pound businessman whilst playing for both Bolton and Manchester City (and England, too) and how I would dream I was playing for Bolton Wanderers FC:

When we recorded the song the studio was almost as full of people as those matches in the groves had been, and we even sampled the Match Of The Day theme tune. Although the song was performed in a hundred folk clubs across the North West and delivered in scores of Primary and Secondary Schools we visited as artists, Lendanear sold only a handful of copies of Moonbeam Dancing, the album that included Cup Finals Every Night, the song I had written with Lowry images playing in my mind.

A more successful song that evoked Lowry, of course, was Pictures Of Matchstalk Men, that incongruously, was our introduction to Status Quo, who would later go Rocking All Over The World. However, I´m not sure that, even though we didn´t write Cup Finals Every Night until years later,  whether I was aware that the Quo song was an allusion to Lowry, although of course, the clue was in the title.

However the ever reliable on-line magazine Songfacts assures me that Status Quo really did write the song about Lowry.

The group’s lead singer Francis Rossi wrote this song, they say. He was still a teenager and it was just the second tune he had ever composed.
Like many of his later songs, this one is about a woman who treats him wrong (“You make men cry, you lie”). In our interview with Rossi, he explained: “‘Matchstick Men’ was basically about my ex-wife. I’d just got married, and I thought, Oh, this is a mistake, what have I done?”

(So, he used a reference to Lowrie´s matchstalk men to create an illusion of resignation, I´m guessing).

This was Status Quo’s debut hit in the UK and their only hit in America. It was originally intended to be a B-side to “Gentleman Joe’s Sidewalk Cafe,” but at the last minute they decided to swap the B-side and the A-side of the single.

Status Quo are best known in Britain for their no-nonsense, heads-down boogie rock which they have played since the 1970s, but this psychedelic effort is their best-known hit in America, where it is a staple of oldies radio.

When the song hit the American charts, the group made the fateful decision to remain in Europe, focusing their efforts on the UK market. This paid off with wild success in their homeland, as Status Quo became one of the most popular bands in Britain, charting over 60 singles. They did tour the US in the mid-’70s, but never broke the American market. Their only other chart entry there was “Ice in the Sun,” released later in 1968.

Lead singer Francis Rossi wrote three-quarters of this song on the toilet, where he’d fled to escape his wife and mother-in-law. The remainder he finished off in the lounge.

This song was inspired, say Songfacts, by the matchstick men paintings of L.S. Lowry (1887-1976). Lowry was an English painter who became famous for painting scenes of life in the industrial districts of northern England during the middle of the 20th century. They were peopled with spindly human figures who looked like matchstick men.

There was a much more sing-along spirit to what became the definitive Lowry celebration song, by a duo with an interesting back-story.

The duo had originally been members of a Stax-style soul band called The Big Sound, working mainly in Denmark, Sweden and Germany, but also touring Israel in 1967. The Big Sound had previously backed singer Karol Keyes, now known as the actress Luan Peters. In Denmark, the band were the backing group to the Danish singer, Rock Nalle

Brian and Michael was originally called Burke and Jerk, a comedy duo composed of Brian Burke and Mick Coleman, formed in 1976, some nine years after Coleman had left The Big Sound. During the intervening years Parrott and Coleman had stayed friends, and Coleman had followed Parrott’s recording career as lead guitarist with Manchester rock band Oscar, who were signed to DJM Records.

When Coleman first wrote “Matchstalk Men and Matchstalk Cats and Dogs“, he took the song to Parrott. The latter borrowed the estimated £1,000 to produce the record which was recorded at Pluto Studios in Stockport, in the same building as Strawberry Studios. Pluto Studios was owned by the former Herman’s Hermits rhythm guitar player Keith Hopwood. The song was recorded over three sessions starting on 25 September 1977. The brass band on the recording is Tintwistle Brass Band, from the village in Derbyshire where Parrott lived at the time.

Parrott tried without success to get a release with several record labels, but eventually secured a recording contract with Pye Records. However, Brian Burke left the act just a couple of weeks after “Matchstalk Men and Matchstalk Cats and Dogs” was released on 25 November 1977, citing family reasons

Parrott left Oscar after 10 years, and teamed up with Coleman again, in the live act to try to keep up the promotion of “Matchstalk Men”, and had to be billed as ‘Brian’. The first run of records had already been pressed as Brian and Michael before Burke had left the act.

After their success, Brian and Michael released a follow-up single, “Evensong” (written by Phil Hampson), and an album, The Matchstalk Men, followed by a second album named I Can Count My Friends On One Hand. Backing singers St Winifred’s School Choir released an unsuccessful album entitled The Matchstalk Children.

Coleman and Parrott remain in the music industry as songwriters and record producers for themselves and other acts. Other chart success as writers/producers were with “The Sparrow” (The Ramblers, No 11 in 1979), and Claire and Friends‘ “It’s ‘Orrible Being in Love when You’re Eight and a Half” (Number 13 in 1986). Coleman also wrote the hit song “Hold My Hand” for Ken Dodd.

St Winifred’s School Choir had their own number one hit with “There’s No One Quite Like Grandma” during Christmas time in 1980.^[6]

In an article in The Guardian newspaper, Parrott said “we started performing together again in 2002, and are incredibly moved by the reception we get. We did a reunion concert at Manchester’s Lowry Centre with the original St Winifred’s girls.

In February 2012, Brian and Michael decided to form a new band and recruited their respective brothers, former Dooleys drummer Nigel Parrott, and Tim Coleman as lead vocalist. They also added a keyboard player – The Dakotas keysman, Toni Baker, made several guest appearances – and Ian Jenkins took over the role in 2014.

In ‘The Matchstalk Men’, Coleman has returned to his bass playing roots, Parrott to his rock guitar style, and the band are performing songs from the two Brian and Michael albums, plus “many of the favourites we grew up with during our 1950s and 1960s formative years”.

2015 celebrated 50 years for Kevin Parrott and Mick Coleman as musical colleagues.

Following Tim Coleman’s retirement from the band in 2016, the position of lead vocalist with ‘The Matchstalk Men’ was taken by Steve Pickering (aka comedian Dudley Doolittle), an old friend of Parrot and Coleman’s who actually compèred a show at the London Palladium on the night, in 1978, that Brian and Michael topped the bill as ‘number one’ recording artists.

Ian Jenkins retired from the business in 2017 and his place on keyboards was, once again, filled by Toni Baker.

So LS Lowry, almost foifty years after his death, having been the subject of a cinematic biopic, a number one hit record and at least two other songs celebrating him and / or his art now sees one of his most loved works once again going to market. Sometime, later today, that work of art will be Going once, going twice, gone to the match, at the thud of a gavel and sold for x million pounds to the man with Sidetracks And Detours printed on his t-shirt.

I wish !

Having said that, it seems like art-collecting is more like an atomic war zone than any aesthetic arena at the moment. Bethaney Minell, arts and entertainments officer for Sky Arts asserted recently that, whether it’s marketplace misogyny or unconscious collusion, female artists are losing out.

DAMIEN HIRST: LIGHTING A MATCH

Art is what you make of it right? asked Bethaney. Wrong – it turns out art created by a man is worth 10 times as much as that of a woman. And worse than that – if a woman’s name is on the canvas, the price decreases even further.

We all know the famous artists whose work sells for millions – Salvador Dali, Andy Warhol, Damien Hirst, David Hockney, Pablo Picasso and Jeff Koons (and now Lowry?)  to name but a few. It doesn’t take a genius to spot the common denominator – they’re all men.

Now new research has found that despite leaps in gender equality since the days of the old masters, contemporary art by men sells for significantly more than work by women.

For every £1 fetched by a male artist’s work, one by a woman gets just 10p – and even worse – the value of a painting increases when a man signs it and decreases when it’s woman’s name on the canvas.

The woman who did the research, art historian and author Doctor Helen Gorrill, who lectures at the University of Dundee, tells Sky News it’s a blow to women preparing to launch their careers.

“There have been quite prominent artists who are about to go into big collections across the world, and they were told when they found out they were actually women that they wouldn’t accept them in the collections… It’s really, really shocking and it’s quite disheartening as well to a lot of the students I’m teaching at the moment.”

Dr Gorrill was inspired to do the research after reading an article by German artist Georg Baselitz who claimed women couldn’t paint, using as his proof the lower price their artwork commanded in comparison to that of men.

Meanwhile Bethany Minell ´counterpart, entertainment reporter at Sky News, Gemma Peplow reports that Damien Hirst has started burning millions of pounds worth of his art as part of a project testing the value of physical paintings versus digital works – and Hirst asked of Sky News: “Who’s to judge what’s right and wrong and what’s real and not?”

Hirst (left), who rose to fame in the 1990s – winning the Turner Prize with an installation of a bisected cow and calf in formaldehyde – is setting fire to works created for The Currency, a project launched in July 2021.

The celebrated, if enigmatic artist has explained that his collectors were given a choice: take a physical Hirst original (quite a bargain at $2,000) or opt for an NFT digital version.

Given a year to decide, buyers had to make their minds up in July this year. The result? Some 5,149 physical pieces will remain intact, their virtual doppelgangers deleted – while 4,851 NFTs will live on in the digital sphere, their painting equivalents going up in smoke.

Hirst has now started the fire for the unchosen physical pieces, with burning set to continue at his Newport Street Gallery near Vauxhall, south London, over the next few weeks.

He told Sky News he doesn’t see his project as burning his art, rather transforming it – but admitted that with his background firmly in the physical art world, he did need to get to grips with the digital one.

“I’m kind of rooted in the physical world, so I find the digital world more challenging,” he said. “I think this has to be part of the process. To create truly digital artworks is to destroy the physical artwork.”

On the first day of the burning, the smell of torched paper lingers throughout the gallery. All 10,000 paintings are represented here, with the 5,149 works whose owners opted for the physical greyed out.

At the moment, the majority of the other 4,851 are still in place, ready to be burnt, while blank rectangles occupy the spaces of those torched so far. By the end of the month, these will represent almost half.

Kyle Johns, 28, from Cwmbran in south Wales, said he originally thought it was an obvious choice – but as the year went on, he changed his mind.

“I came into it, I was always art. I was going to have art on the wall. But it changed. We were in the community and it was nice. We were all in an [online] group and it’s just been brilliant.

“Over the year, the NFT became appealing. It’s hard to explain. If I try and tell my mum I’ve got a picture of a picture that’s going to be burnt, it doesn’t make sense. But when you think of it as the future, it is an art form, it’s digital – and we all have a phone.

“I’m not taking my wall [out] with me, I’m taking my phone and my NFT collection.”

Hirst says he views The Currency as a work of art in which people participate by buying, holding, selling and exchanging the works. The community, the burning, is all part of the art, part of the experiment.

Many who chose NFTs and resold early on have done well. In September 2021, the buyer of number 2,604, titled Revocation, sold it for $172,239 (£154,313). This was the NFT version. According to Hirst’s book on the project, The Currency has so far generated $89m (£78.9m) in sales.

Mr Johns, whose physical piece will burn later in October, says he may look to sell at some point, but for now he is enjoying the experience.

His joining The Currency led to a charity fundraising event supported by the artist – and he now even has a tattoo of another of Hirst’s famous artworks, the formaldehyde shark.

“For now, it’s about the community,” he said. “I think [the NFTs] are trading at about $7,000 (£6,281) now. We’ll see what happens.”

Sky News Gemma Peplow revealed ´some background

Is setting fire to millions of pounds worth of art a good idea? she asked.

About a year ago, Damien Hirst sold thousands of NFTs of his famous spot paintings, giving buyers the choice to keep the digital art, or swap for the original physical work. NFTs worth millions have since been destroyed – and today he’ll start setting fire to the originals, too.

When he’s not preserving dead animals in formaldehyde or encrusting skulls with diamonds, Damien Hirst is known for his spots.

On the surface, they appear to be a more innocent affair, clusters of rainbow blobs that simply make the beholder feel happy, rather than provoking the outrage that a pickled shark or sliced-down-the middle cow and her calf might, say, or a photograph of the artist posing and grinning next to a severed human head.

That was until Hirst announced his spots were to become part of an NFT experiment, The Currency, a project met with glee and admiration by some in the art world and fans of his work – but a fair amount of scepticism and criticism, too.

First up, for those who managed to avoid the explosion in the past couple of years, an NFT is a non-fungible token, a unique digital asset. NFTs can be anything digital – music, video clips, art, even a tweet.

In 2021, Collins Dictionary made NFT its word of the year, and an NFT created by digital artist Beeple sold for $69.3m (£50.3m at the time) through Christie’s – the first sale ever by a major auction house of a piece of art that does not exist in physical form

For a short period of time, NFTs seemed a sure-fire way for artists and investors to make money. Following the initial boom, the market has crashed somewhat, but does that matter for those who simply want to enjoy their digital art?

It’s a concept many find difficult to get their heads round.

Enter the industry’s enfant terrible Hirst, who in 2016 began work on a conceptual art project, creating 10,000 unique but visually similar A4-sized spot paintings. In July 2021, he revealed these would form the basis of The Currency, his first NFT collection.

Would-be buyers entered a lottery to pick up a piece for $2,000 (about £1,770 now, something of a bargain for a Hirst original). Those who were successful were given a choice: keep the NFT and see the physical painting incinerated, or swap it for the original, obliterating the digital version.

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They had a year to make their minds up and the split was tighter even than that other famous controversial vote that started in 2016: 5,149 buyers opted for the physical artworks, 4,851 kept the NFTs.

It should be noted here that this figure is slightly skewed, however, by the fact Hirst backed the new art form he was embracing, keeping 1,000 pieces as NFTs for himself. But still, there is plenty of confidence in digital among fans of the project, too.

Some made their minds up quickly, others waited until the end. In September 2021, the buyer of number 2,604, titled Revocation, sold it on for $172,239 (about £150,000 now). This was the NFT version. According to Hirst’s book on the project, The Currency has so far generated $89m (£78.9m) in sales.

The experiment is now on display to the public at Hirst’s Newport Street Gallery in Vauxhall, south London.

Ten thousand artworks sounds like a lot, but it’s perhaps only when you see the display in real life that you can appreciate the project’s scale. (Sorry, NFT aficionados, the digital realm just doesn’t quite capture the size in the same way.)

Each artwork is numbered, titled, stamped, and signed by Hirst, with a watermark, a microdot and a hologram containing his portrait, and a title generated through AI using some of his favourite song lyrics. On each piece, no colour is repeated.

All 10,000 paintings are represented at the gallery, suspended in perspex. The 5,149 works whose owners opted for the physical are greyed out, the pieces now no doubt cheering up walls around the world; the remaining 4,851 are tangibly there, ready for their multimillion-pound bonfire, due to begin today.

The painting pyres await them upstairs.

Hirst says he views The Currency as a work of art in which people participate by buying, holding, selling and exchanging the pieces.

So, is his testing of the worth of digital art versus physical a genius, boundary-pushing endeavour – or just another publicity and money-making stunt?

Writing for the i paper, art critic Florence Hallett describes The Currency as “rather like a small child dangling teddy over the lavatory in a bid for the upper hand – only with considerably less sincerity and stupendous amounts of money”.

In a column entitled “How it all went wrong for Damien Hirst”, The Sunday Times’ chief art critic Waldemar Januszczak – who says he was a loyal admirer of the artist’s previous work – describes NFTs as something “invented by the Devil to lure fools into the art world and persuade them to spend their money on nothing”.

But for one of the art world’s greatest provocateurs, the criticism surely only adds to the enjoyment. And he has more than enough admirers of his work.

Molly Jane Zuckerman, head of content for the crypto data provider CoinMarketCap, entered the ballot to pick up a piece of The Currency, but was unsuccessful. Despite her work in the crypto industry, she says she would have chosen the physical painting as an NFT version would have felt like a “pale imitation” of an original Hirst.

However, she believes it is all down to personal preference.

She said: “Some NFT digital art is so cool. I own a few NFTs that I think are fascinating. Most of them cost me less than $3 and I just like looking at them…

“But I like to appreciate my art in person. And I don’t think that appreciating art in person is necessarily better or worse or makes art more valid, if you can touch it, it was painted, versus being created online. I just think every person has different ways that aesthetics please them.

“I would love a Damien Hirst hanging in my house and I would feel less aesthetically pleased by seeing it on my iPhone or as my profile picture.

“But people like different things and I can’t fault them for wanting to have, you know, a $2m picture of a monkey on their profile picture. That’s completely their prerogative.”

Artist Roy Tyson, who goes by the name Roy’s People, is known for his work with miniature figurines, and often uses other creators’ themes – including Banksy, Keith Haring and Hirst – as backdrops for his own.

In 2021, he became the owner of The Currency piece 4,967, titled What Am I To Know, and earlier this year made the decision to keep the physical painting and destroy the NFT.

“I’m a big fan of Hirst and I love the way he pushes the boundaries and doesn’t answer to anyone, doesn’t really sort of stick to any old-fashioned rules of the art world,” Tyson says.

“My original thinking when this came out was, ‘wow, an original Damien Hirst for £1,500’. That’s unheard of, no brainer.”

But seeing some NFT versions sell for high sums early on made him temporarily re-evaluate.

He added: “You start thinking, what could this be worth? It’s been such a journey… in the end I decided to go with my original thinking. I don’t know if that’s the right or wrong thing, but it’s been quite a rollercoaster.”

Tyson has only created physical artworks himself but says the same rules apply when it comes to purchasing digital art.

“With collecting art with a view to investment rather than collecting art for art’s sake, you’ve got to know what you’re buying.

photo 7 “It kind of feels like it probably is the art of the future and the way people might collect. Look at cash, you know, cash has disappeared. Digital currency, essentially, we just see numbers on our on our screens. But I don’t think physical art will ever disappear.”

Of course, destroying art is nothing new. In the case of Banksy’s Love Is In The Bin (left) – the artwork that shredded itself after being sold in 2018 – it only added to its value, selling again for £18.5m in October 2021, a record for the artist at auction.

Hirst himself claims he struggled with the decision of what to do with his own 1,000 pieces from the collection, saying he was “all over the f****** shop with my decision making, trying to work out what I should do”.

Writing on Twitter in July, he said: “I believe in art and art in all its forms but in the end I thought f*** it! this zone is so f****** exciting and the one I know least about and I love this NFT community it blows my mind.”

While she doesn’t necessarily consider NFTs completely the future of art, Zuckerman believes Hirst’s project is an interesting exploration of what consumers deem valuable.

“Artists do experiment,” she says. “I think that a lot of what [Hirst] does with dots and with his [physical] artwork, you know, 100, 200 years ago also wouldn’t be considered art. And now it is, once people moved on beyond just considering realism, oil paintings, you know, biblical paintings, art.

“I am all for artists experimenting with as many forms as possible. I think there are really cool things that NFTs can do and can bring. NFTs can change over time, they can evolve. They can be 3D rotating figures, something that a pencil, a paintbrush physically cannot do. So I don’t think there’s any reason for artists not to.

Of course, destroying art is nothing new. In the case of Banksy’s Love Is In The Bin – the artwork that shredded itself after being sold in 2018 – it only added to its value, selling again for £18.5m in October 2021, a record for the artist at auction

.Hirst himself claims he struggled with the decision of what to do with his own 1,000 pieces from the collection, saying he was “all over the f****** shop with my decision making, trying to work out what I should do”.

“Artists do experiment,” Zuckerman says. “I think that a lot of what [Hirst] does with dots and with his [physical] artwork, you know, 100, 200 years ago also wouldn’t be considered art. And now it is, once people moved on beyond just considering realism, oil paintings, you know, biblical paintings, art.

“I am all for artists experimenting with as many forms as possible. I think there are really cool things that NFTs can do and can bring. NFTs can change over time, they can evolve. They can be 3D rotating figures, something that a pencil, a paintbrush physically cannot do. So I don’t think there’s any reason for artists not to use NFTs.”

However, she adds that NFTs are no longer a certain fast-track to making money.

“If you are buying an NFT for a specific reason – you want to be part of an exclusive club, for example. The Bored Ape Yacht Club, people that own those NFTs, they do get the perks of being in this community; there are events, there are meet-ups, there’s the clout associated with it on social media and sometimes in real life as well. That makes sense to own an NFT.

“If you want to support an artist, definitely, buying their art in any form is supporting that particular artist. If you want to make a quick buck, that’s not really the case anymore. The hype in terms of flipping NFTs for making a significant amount of money, it definitely still can be done but it’s not the [case of] taking candy from a baby that it was about a year ago.”

Six months, five years, a century down the line: which of The Currency works will be worth more?

Hirst says he is “proud to have created something alive, something and provocative” – and that the excitement is in the unknown.

“I have no idea what the future holds, whether the NFTs or physicals are going to be more valuable or less. But that is art! The fun, part of the journey and maybe the point of the whole project. Even after one year, I feel the journey is just beginning.”

The Currency exhibition is open now at Newport Street Gallery, running until 30 October 2022

Don´t forget to log in to day 4 of our LS Lowry festival at Sidetracks And Detours tomorrow to learn more about Mrs. Lowry and Son.

Also visit again us on Friday when we close our all encompassing festival with a summation of Lowry´s life and career, and, if it is announced in time, will also tell you how much Going To The match brought auction at Sotheby´s being held later today.