Musician and artist Grimes has sold a collection of digital artwork for nearly $ 6m as a high-profile proof of the fear of “non-fiction” (NFTs) – images, film clips, animations and even poems that are bought and sold online for ever-growing sums.
Grimes, nicknamed Claire Boucher, announced the auction on Twitter the day before the collection went on sale.
☘︎𝔊𝔯𝔦𝔪𝔢𝔰
(@Grimezsz)Dropping off NFTs tomorrow at 2pm EST. enter the gap pic.twitter.com/l9fNFUCheX
A total of 10 works of art, produced in collaboration with Grimes’ brother Mac Boucher, were sold at the auction, known as WarNymph Collection Vol 1. Two of the works, short video clips by called Earth and Mars, given as major editions at its fixed price of $ 7,500 (£ 5,400), and each sold about 300 copies in the 48 hours they sold.
Others, including a video piece called Death of the Old, were once sold to the highest bidder, priced at nearly $ 400,000 after four buyers left engaged in a claim war.
All the pieces were sold as NFTs, a branch of the cryptocurrency sector that allows works of art and other media to be “tokenised” and sold through digital asset-like mechanisms such as bitcoin.
The range has been growing in recent weeks, with digital products as diverse as pixelated punches, pink cats, and a picture of Homer Simpson as a green frog selling for tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars.
It was considered a new way for artists to keep track of their work, thanks to technical features allowing them to not only sell the token but also benefit from a percentage of the next value. reic.
But others have criticized NFTs for their lack of convenience and environmental burden. When a digital asset is “sold”, the owner receives nothing but a record: the image, video or song itself must be protected using custom copyright.
And, as with many other cryptocurrencies in the cryptocurrency space, all transactions on most NFT services use additional electricity. According to a calculator made by digital artist Memo Akten, the sale of 303 editions of Grimes’s Earth used the same electric power as the average EU resident in 33 years, and produced 70 tonnes of CO2 releases.