Exclusive: Potentially thousands of signed works from Currency series were mass-produced by artist’s team after 2016, sources sayAt least 1,000 paintings that the artist Damien Hirst said were “made in 2016” were created several years later, the Guardian can reveal.Hirst produced 10,000 of the paintings, each comprising colourful hand-painted dots on...

Tired of colonial artefacts being hoarded, Chidi Nwaubani and Ahmed Abokor use tech to redistribute them from museums in audacious digital heistsIn March last year, two men in tracksuits, wearing hockey masks and carrying matching laundry bags, headed for the British Museum. Just outside, patrolling police asked the two strange-looking men where they...

Experts on tech, politics and culture weigh in on the year the hype faded and what could come nextRemember 2022? Elon Musk had just been named Time’s Person of The Year, Marvel still ruled the box office, Tucker Carlson was the most-watched host on cable news and it seemed as if all of life was going to take place on the blockchain (the Staples Center...

In this week’s newsletter: in early 2022 ‘non-fungible tokens’ were a supposedly revolutionary million-dollar asset. Now, they’re practically worthless• Don’t get TechScape delivered to your inbox? Sign up hereA funny thing happened in Hong Kong earlier this month. Well, funny unless you were there.The annual ApeFest, where collectors of Bored Ape NFTs...

More than a dozen attenders of NFT group’s festival, which used ultraviolet light, complained of ‘eye burn’ on social mediaThe company behind the Bored Ape crypto art craze is looking into reports that people have been suffering from eye burn, extreme pain and impaired vision after attending one of its events, which was lit by UV lights.The ApeFest...

We only loved non-fungible tokens – now all but worthless – during a pandemic peak of online loneliness. What will the next craze look like?With last week’s report that 95% of them are now worthless, I think it’s just about safe to say that the NFT moment is finally over. Phew. There really was a six-week period at the start of last year when I thought...