Elon Musk’s baby-mama/love interest Grimes recently made a $6 million score in only 20 minutes by selling digital artwork in an online auction.
The art comes with a digital asset called an “NFT” that proves its authenticity, according to The Daily Mail. She told 10 items from a collection she is calling “WarNymph” (of course), which included “dramatic illustrations of winged baby goddesses battling in apocalyptic skies” (of course).
The non-fungible token that the works come with is encrypted with the artist’s signature and authenticates the art as original. It relies on blockchain to verify authenticity.
The collection went on sale on Sunday and had roped in $5.8 million within 20 minutes of being launched. There were up to 100 copies of some pieces being sold, while other works were limited to just one copy.
Grimes sold, for instance, a video piece called ‘Death of the Old’ and another item called “Newborn 2”. Newborn 2 has already been listed for resale, as of Monday, with a $2.5 million asking price. The baby in the drawings is – wait for it – “described as belonging to a ‘Grimes narrative universe’ and will continue to ‘evolve’ in subsequent works”, the Daily Mail wrote.
Grimes made the artwork with her brother Mac Boucher, an advertisement for the collection said. She is currently worth about $3 million and the auction marked her first foray into NFTs and selling artwork. The NFTs have “surged in popularity” since the beginning of Covid, as have pieces of digital art and digital assets.
Other NFTs have been used for items like land in virtual environments or exclusive use of cryptocurrency wallet names. The tokens are unique and cannot be exchanged on a like-for-like basis. Blockchain enables them to be publicly verified.
NFT marketplace OpenSea says it has seen monthly sales volume grow to $86.3 million in February, as of Friday, up from $8 million in January. OpenSea’s co-founder Alex Atallah said: “If you spend 10 hours a day on the computer, or eight hours a day in the digital realm, then art in the digital realm makes tonnes of sense – because it is the world.”
Art collector Pablo Rodriguez-Fraile, who, according to The Daily Mail recently sold a 10-second video for $6.6 million, said: “You can go in the Louvre and take a picture of the Mona Lisa and you can have it there, but it doesn’t have any value because it doesn’t have the provenance or the history of the work.”
“The reality here is that this is very, very valuable because of who is behind it.”
