fART is art
The cryptocurrency era has opened to new ways to make money as well as to new digital ways to make art. Thanks to the blockchain, which assures each transaction to be unique and verified, NFTs were born. They are Non-Fungible Tokens, digital assets that can represent a piece of art whether it’s an image or a short clip, but with the guarantee to be unique hence valuable.
Now, a Brooklyn-based filmmaker is mocking NFTs while also attempting to profit from them by selling a year’s of fart audio snippets captured in quarantine.
“If people are selling digital art and GIFs, why not sell farts?” Alex Ramírez-Mallis, 36, said.
Ramrez-Mallis’ NFT entitled “One Calendar Year of Recorded Farts“, began in March 2020, when he with four friends began sending recordings of their farts to a WhatsApp group conversation at the start of the global coronavirus lockdown.
Individual fart recordings can also be purchased for 0.05 Ethereum ($85). So far, the group has sold one to an anonymous buyer.
“If the value increases, they could have an extremely valuable fart on their hands”, he said.
Ramírez-Mallis and his friends did not begin recording their farts with profit in mind, but the recent NFT madness, which has seen the ownership of abstract assets be sold for seven, and eight-digit price tags, provided the perfect outlet to share their large back catalog of farts.
Ramrez-Mallis and his pals didn’t start recording their farts for the sake of profit, but the recent NFT craze presented the ideal outlet to share their vast back catalog of farts.
“The NFT craze is absurd, this idea of putting a value on something inherently intangible”, said Ramírez-Mallis, referencing screenshots of screenshots and the concept of colors that are currently being sold as NFTs. “These NFTs aren’t even farts, they’re just digital alphanumeric strings that represent ownership”.
The trend of NFTs has made the concept of selling the idea of ownership profitable to the online masses. Indeed, he’s not even the only person selling fart NFTs.
Even though the concept may seem foolish, Ramrez-Mallis keeps seeking to benefit from it.
“I’m hoping these NFT farts can at once critique [the absurdity], make people laugh, and make me rich”, he said.
“In many ways, this is a bubble, but it’s also been around forever”, he said, comparing NFTs to wealthy art collectors who buy expensive artwork, store them, and only display their certificate of ownership before selling it for a profit. “Buying and selling art purely as a commodity to store value in has been around for centuries, and NFTs are just a digital way of representing that transactional nature of art”.
A consultant for Ramrez-Mallis’ fart NFT agrees and says he offered to assist Ramrez-Mallis with some technical aspects of the project because he admired the peculiarity of the NFT phenomenon.
“By purchasing an NFT, you become part of the in-crowd of a technological novelty that masquerades as revolutionary but operates in the same tired old way of the existing art market”, Grayson Earle, a friend of Ramrez-Mallis and the founder of the cryptocurrency Bail Bloc, said.
While Ramrez-Mallis and Earle acknowledge that the digital art behind NFTs is often engaging, they disagree on how soon the price tag becomes significantly more important than the creative value.
“The art is just an avatar for value”, Ramrez-Mallis pointed out that the people driving the crazed market aren’t digital art collectors, but speculators looking to make money quickly.
To learn more about the world of NTFs, there is a fairly comprehensive guide for beginners where you can find all the most important information about them.
Source nypost.com
