Questions about the nature and value of art are not new: a century has passed since Marcel Duchamp turned a urinal upside down, signed it R Mutt and presented it as Fountain to the Society of Independent Artists, in response to its promise that it would accept any work of art so long as the artist paid the application fee.
New times need new questions, and one was flamboyantly posed last week by the artist Damien Hirst, when he started to burn hundreds of his own spot paintings after offering buyers the choice of purchasing them as original artworks or as £2,000 non-fungible tokens (NFTs). To destroy the originals where buyers chose NFTs has a certain logic; the issue is whether this amounts to more than selling a title deed and bulldozing the house.
