GREAT EXPECTATIONS

Great Expectations

HENI is delighted to present Great Expectations, the second NFT collection by Damien Hirst. Great Expectations contains 10,000 unique artworks made by Damien Hirst, and will be airdropped free of charge to owners of a The Currency NFT.

Following on from the artwork that he created for Drake’s “Certified Lover Boy” album cover, at the center of these artworks are grids of emoji-like pregnant women whose forms have been constructed from spots of various shapes, sizes and colors taken directly from The Currency artworks themselves. The collection references some of the most iconic imagery from Hirst’s monumental career.

Damien Hirst

Damien Hirst is a British artist whose name has become synonymous with contemporary art. Since his generative work as a student at Goldsmiths College of Art, Hirst’s production has been boundary‐redefining in nature. Working across media, including installation, painting, sculpture, drawing and NFTs, Hirst explores the complex relationships between art, beauty, religion, science, life and death. He constantly returns to these foundational interests and themes, which he reworks to develop an innovative visual language.

A Unique Grid

Released four months after Damien Hirst’s first NFT project, Great Expectations is a collection of 10,000 unique artworks. Drawing on the logic of his generative Spot Paintings series (begun in 1986) and following on from the cover he designed for Drake’s “Certified Lover Boy” album (2021), each NFT arranges 12 emoji-like pregnant women into a strict grid format.

These digitally constructed artworks directly interact with the experimentations at the centre of The Currency. The involvement of The Currency in this project is referenced in the forms of the pregnant women: their physical forms and attributes are composed of spots found in The Currency artworks.

These artworks are airdropped (automatically sent to select wallet addresses) to existing The Currency NFT holders. Only holders that have an existing, unburned The Currency NFT will be airdropped a Great Expectations NFT. Collectors who have burned their NFT in exchange for the physical artwork will not receive their corresponding Great Expectations NFT.

At the heart of The Currency project is Hirst’s interest in belief, value and collecting, constructing an experiment that is reliant on where The Currency holders place their belief, the physical artwork or the NFT, and how the behaviour of others influences their decision.

Rarities

Each of the 10,000 Great Expectations NFTs is an original artwork that is made unique through its combination of colors or attributes. There are a total of 42,226 rarities that fall into one of the seven categories: accessories, clothing, facial features, hair, headwear, occupation and background.

In some cases, an NFT can contain more than one special rarity. A notable example of this is the occasional correlation between clothing and background. For example, there are 2 NFTs which contain tops with a Cherry Blossom and a corresponding Cherry Blossom Background. While some of the special attributes like Graduation Cap, Princess, Money Bag, and Doctor contain universally recognised and used imagery, others are notably Hirstian. Not only are the designs of some clothing and backgrounds derived from Hirst’s best-known series, including Spot Paintings and Cherry Blossoms, but his oeuvre is also referenced in the Diamond Skull face and the Butterfly Hair Clip accessory.

The rarities of Great Expectations are clearly tracked, with each attribute being measured as a percentage of its occurrence within the overall collection. Another of the distinguishing characteristics is the number of times an outfit is repeated within a single NFT. This rarity is also significant in its defiance of the logic that dominates Hirst’s Spot Paintings, Colour Space and The Currency series in which no two colors are repeated within a single work.