Is it art? NFTs and the surge of digital ownership.
In March, Kenny Schachter proclaimed that he’d auctioned off his grandmother on the internet. The digital artist had uploaded an image of his long-deceased matriarch to the web and sold the rights to it as a nonfungible token (NFT). It was a prankish test of the boundaries of a technology that has the art world abuzz.
NFTs are certificates of ownership of a unique digital item such as a video, recording, or cyber artwork. These digital receipts reside on the blockchain (a digital ledger). Once an NFT has been “minted” – its code permanently woven into the blockchain’s DNA-like digital strands – it can be bought or sold with a cybercurrency, currently Ethereum. In March, an artist who calls himself Beeple auctioned a mosaic of digital images for an NFT that fetched the equivalent of more than $69 million.
In the case of Mr. Schachter, “I found myself repeating again and again that everyone and their grandmother were minting NFTs. So
Basketball and tweets, too“Our work is real”