Ohe hasn’t yet, who still wants? Anything hitting the market now as a non-fungible token seems downright inflationary. Secondary exploitations of analog prehistoric works of art associated with big names are popular: NFTs derived from them, i.e. virtual certificates of ownership in the blockchain, create universes of digital products difficult to apprehend around a core brand with recognized artistic seriousness. The principle is similar to that of museum shops and fan article shops: instead of printed T-shirts or mugs, NFTs are offered for sale, collectibles with a speculative future .
Cold, calculator and climate killer due to high computing power? Romantic, says the Belvedere in Vienna and offers 10,000 NFT for Valentine’s Day, which is the same number of digital extracts from Gustav Klimt’s “Kiss”. The tokens to be completed with a personal dedication cost more than a bouquet of red roses: each 1850 euros in crypto currency. The house is for sale on thekiss.art platform with the start-up artèQ. Registration has been ongoing since last Wednesday, sales begin Feb. 9, and freshly minted stamps are expected to be issued by the 14th of the month. “What does it mean to own a work of art in the digital age? asks the general manager of the Belvedere, Stella Rollig, in view of the campaign. The answer is simple: 18.5 million euros in revenue for the Belvedere if all goes well. “Tu felix Austria”, Berlin’s museums can sigh at this or peer into the land where lemons bloom and the Uffizi has plugged Corona-ripped budget holes with NFT.
Belvedere Valentine’s Day Gifts: Managing Director Stella Rollig and Managing Director Wolfgang Bergmann are selling 10,000 NFT clips of Klimt’s “Kiss” for 1,850 euros each.
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Image: belvedere.at
Will Julian Lennon get as much out of it? John Lennon’s eldest son wants to donate some of the proceeds from the NFT auction of Beatles memorabilia, which he organized on the Yellow Heart platform via Julien’s Auctions, to a charitable foundation founded by his father. You can bid online in the Ether cryptocurrency until February 7. The best lot is an NFT – not the paper! – the original liner notes of the Beatles song “Hey Jude”, written by Paul McCartney as a comfort song for parting child Julian.
Sell virtually, store physically
That’s what Lennon Jr. wants, or so he says, to honor his father’s legacy. There is something slyly cathartic about the virtual sale of the estate to remain physically in possession of the objects.
‘Na na na nananana, nannana, hey Jude’: Paul McCartney’s draft for the famous song is auctioned as NFT at ‘Julien’s Auctions’.
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Image: julienslive.com
Descendants of another father wanted to follow a slightly different path: Marina Picasso, the artist’s granddaughter, and her son Florian had announced the sale of 1010 NFT, which were to be linked to an unpublished ceramic by the Catalan of 1958, which will soon also be physically available, would be auctioned. The sale of a five-times 200 NFT edition on the ManAndTheBeats.com family marketplace was scheduled to begin on Friday, followed by ten NFTs on the Nifty Gateway platform. Part of the profits are donated to charity.
But then the lawyer for the Picasso administration, founded by Picasso’s son, Claude, as administrator of the estate and responsible for allocating the rights, was clear: the announced NFT sale of the ceramics of Pablo Picasso will not take place, nor their physical auction. The ads launched as a result are “completely fake”. And his great-grandson Florian Picasso, a DJ and music producer, countered: the NTFs he wanted to sell were actually his own work and not his great-grandfather’s. The common term for such an action is actually more of a misnomer.
The effort of another clan in the lucrative crypto market could also cause new problems: Mara de Anda Romeo, a great-grandniece of Frida Kahlo, recently announced on the ezel.life platform that a brick of the artist’s red house would be NFTed, which will virtually form the basis of a Kahlo metaverse. We remember: the same Mara de Anda Romeo sued the launch of a Frida Kahlo Barbie because the doll did not represent what her model represented.
The deal with toymaker Mattel was brokered by Panama-based Frida Kahlo Corporation, founded by Kahlo’s family and Casablanca Distributors – and crossed with Mara de Anda Romeo. The trial ended without a verdict because the American court seized did not consider itself responsible for the Mexican-Panamanian disputes. In any case, the new NFT project will be presented at the Sagamore Hotel during the next Art Basel Miami Beach.
Pulled into the blockchain by the ZKM: “CryptoPunk 2838” by Matt Hall, 2017, 24 by 24 pixels
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Image: John Watkinson, Matt Hall
To hold or to sell, to have or to be: the Center for Art and Media (ZKM) in Karlsruhe has unwittingly made a decision that was casually exalted above such market activity. Daniel Heiss, curator responsible for the collection’s NFT, wanted to store two “CryptoPunks” in a new hardware wallet, i.e. another digital wallet, for security reasons. Instead of sending it to the wallet address, it accidentally sent it to the CryptoPunks developers’ smart contract address, a location on the blockchain to which no one knows the key.
The NFTs, which the ZKM acquired in 2018 for the equivalent of around $100 each and which could currently be sold for $170,000 or more, lie there as if walled in: access impossible, trading also continued. And all because of a copy-paste error. “We never intended to monetize the NFT in our collection anyway,” says Heiss. Now they belonged to the ZKM forever, untouchable. And are likely to increase demand for the remaining “CryptoPunks” in the market.