Heard this shit on NPR a couple of days ago. Them trying to brainwash their listeners to think selling digital "art" for $69,000,000 is totally normal and NOT money laundering.

coulda sworn I had some Hunter Art memes. Guess it'll have to be some other anon digital art.

>https://www.npr.org/2021/12/04/1061539871/nft-art-craze-hits-miami-art-basel

Art & Design

NFT art craze hits Miami Art Basel

December 4, 20215:09 PM ET

Heard on All Things Considered

NPR's David Folkenflik talks to arts journalist Sophie Haigney about the popularity of NFT art at Art Basel in Miami this year.

DAVID FOLKENFLIK, HOST:

The Broadway play "Art" centered on a painting that was just a white canvas, I mean totally white, with a few white painted lines. The work sold for a fortune. Bonds between three friends frayed over the question at the center of the play. Was that art? This week, artist, tastemakers and collectors from around the world are mingling in Miami Beach for the exuberant fare known as Art Basel Miami. Much of the excitement there centers on NFT art, a type of digital art typically bought with cryptocurrency. NFT means non-fungible tokens. Each item for sale is a digital image with a unique digital fingerprint. And like the painting in the play "Art," NFTs are tying the art world into knots. Might NFT stand for new faddish thing? To help shed light, we're turning to Sophie Haigney. She's a journalist who writes about visual art and technology, and she'll help us understand why it's becoming so popular. Hey, Sophie. Thanks for joining me.

SOPHIE HAIGNEY: Hey, David. Thanks for having me on.

FOLKENFLIK: So I'd like to start with a very simple question. What is NFT art?

HAIGNEY: So NFTs are basically unique assets that are verified by block chain. And so block chain functions kind of like a public ledger, kind of recording transactions and giving buyers a proof of authenticity or ownership. More simply, I like to think about NFTs almost like digital certificates of ownership of a particular thing. Like, a photo, a tweet, an audio file can all have this kind of certificate of ownership attached to it. And so you're not really buying the thing itself. You're buying the proof of owning something.

FOLKENFLIK: So remind us of some of the famous works of NFT art and maybe some of the more infamous ones. You're saying a tweet or a digital representation of a tweet with its underlying certificate of authentication is an object of NFT art. What are some others?

HAIGNEY: Last March, an artist known as Beeple,real name Mike Winkelmann, sold a digital collage at Christie's for__ more than $69 million__.

FOLKENFLIK: Sixty-nine million bucks.

HAIGNEY: Yeah. That's the third-highest price ever achieved by a living artist at Christie's. So that's a really big deal. And I think that's when the art world started to really take notice of this. Also, last March, 621 virtual sneakers. So images of sneakers sold for a combined $3 million.

FOLKENFLIK: So all ideas about art are fundamentally subjective. Many people may remember there was a banana duct-taped to a wall. It sold for $120,000 at Art Basel in 2019. In that case, the artist is known as a prankster. It still went for 120k.

PB

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