Damien Hirst|The Beautiful Painting (H12)

'The Beautiful Paintings' handed the spin painting to its buyers. Software took the place of the spinning machine, and each collector set the variables before chance decided the rest. Why 'Beautiful' The name comes from the spins themselves. Since the 1990s Hirst has titled them with a run of words that opens with 'Beautiful' and closes with 'Painting', as in 'beautiful tasty painting' of 1996. The spin began as his answer to Abstract Expressionism: a machine, not the brush, made the gesture. David Bowie, who made spin paintings with Hirst in 1995, called them "art without the angst", and Hirst has said they hold on to a passing feeling of colourful joy. H12 takes the machine as far as it can go. A program makes the marks, and a machine-learning model writes the titles, naming the chosen style, as in 'Beautiful, Deliciously Clear, Extremely Romantic, Almost Novel Tourbillon Painting'. Made by algorithm Hirst worked with HENI's data scientists for more than a year on the generator. It offers 25 styles, from 'Nimbuses' and 'Vortices' to 'Helter Skelters' and 'Supernovas', with an optional blur that exaggerates the outward rush of paint. The colours carry machine-generated names such as 'Himalayan Waters'. Whatever the choices, each output keeps an element of randomness, as the spins always have. Before printing, every image was upscaled to 16K by a model trained on more than 2,000 of Hirst's spin paintings. The physical works are giclée prints on poly-cotton canvas over birch plywood stretchers. The only paint on them is Hirst's signature, added in paint pen. Demand set the editions The release ran for eleven days, from 31 March to 10 April 2023, and the number sold in each shape and size became that format's edition. Circles outsold squares at every size, by roughly three to one overall: 3,874 circles against 1,235 squares. At auction Each canvas is unique, so results vary widely with format and image. The strongest result so far came at Louiza Auktion in Brussels in March 2024, when a work catalogued as 'Beautiful equally System Painting' made €13,000 (about £11,100) before fees. Before and after The spin first entered HENI's numbered releases in H1 - Enter The Infinite (2016), where a single spin painting was mirrored into woven tapestries. H12 goes further, replacing the painting with code. It also follows H10 - The Empresses, which first offered buyers a choice between print and token. Here they could take the canvas, the NFT or both.