The Art of Making Money is the sort of book title you might see in an airport bookshop.
But the (now not so) Young British Artist Damien Hirst has taken it rather literally.
The back of each is numbered and signed by the artist with an arty title.
Each painting has a digital certificate of ownership a so-called non-fungible token (NFT).
In fact, the buyers of each work have paid US$2,000 for the electronic token only.
If they did so the token was destroyed.
If they decide to keep the token, the artwork was destroyed.
They cannot have both.
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The sale of all 10,000 works is worth $US20 million.
The highest price paid so far is US$120,000, for No.
6272, titled Yes.
But other questions remain.
How many buyers will prefer to have the physical artwork or the digital token?
Will this preference differ between art lovers and speculators?
Will the buyers wait until the last possible days to decide whether to convert to preserve the option value?
On one question, though, we can be most confident of the answer.
Despite the art projects name, these artworks dont make very good currency.
What makes a currency?
For one thing they are not divisible.
It would be hard to buy something worth a lot less than one of the paintings with them.
In this sense they are similar to so-called cryptocurrencies.
Thethousandsof less well-known cryptocurrencies are even more useless for making payments.
Aspiring buyers could register and say how many they wanted (but not nominate which individual work).
The graph below shows these sales.
Secondary sales of Damien Hirsts Currency art works
Almost 500 are currently listed for sale.
What makes one work worth more than another?
Thats hard to say, though titles appear to play a big part.
Valuing collectables
Hirsts experiment already highlights the strange economics of pricing collectables.
In economics the standard valuation technique discounts future values.
It assumes a bird in the hand is worth more than one in the bush.
But art works and similar collectables are different.
That buyer in turn must expect someone else will pay even more.
And so it goes on.
Hirsts experiment has so far demonstrated this graphically.
This often leads to a speculative bubble, which usually ends in tears.
The price may collapse.
By coincidence, Hirsts artworks are currently trading around the same price as one Bitcoin.
I think the paintings are at least pretty.
There are enough people who would like to do that to give this artful currency some underlying fundamental value.
That cant be said of cryptocurrencies.
