Damien Hirst’s All the Children’s Songs (The Currency) is a unique enamel painting on handmade paper from The Currency, one of his most consequential recent projects, in which 10,000 distinct works were conceived as a system where art could function like money. Rooted in the legacy of Pop Art, the project reflects Hirst’s long-standing engagement with mass production, repetition, and value, themes that have defined the movement since the 1960s. Launched with HENI as a one-to-one pairing of each physical painting with an NFT, The Currency asked collectors to decide which version would survive, transforming ownership into an active test of belief, trust, and value.

This proposition places Hirst in direct dialogue with earlier Pop and Conceptual artists such as Andy Warhol and Joseph Beuys, who challenged the boundaries between art, commerce, and capital through gestures like signed banknotes or the declaration that art itself is a form of currency. Having often been criticized for the commercial reach of his practice, Hirst pushed the idea to its logical extreme by producing art at a scale comparable to financial systems, aligning it conceptually with gold or cryptocurrency.

Of the original 10,000 works, only 5,149 physical paintings survived the exchange, making each remaining example a finite artifact of the experiment. Measuring 20 x 30 cm, this work is hand-signed, titled, and dated in pencil, bears the official watermark, dry stamp, and hologram, and is preserved in mint condition in its original HENI packaging.