NFT? WTF!
I never thought myself much of an artist.
My grandfather was though; he used watercolours to paint landscapes and architecture around South Wales, and while an ‘original Bryan Shambler’ isn’t worth a huge amount today (when compared to a David Hockney or Yayoi Kusama), he made a tidy sum of money over the years selling to wealthy people who had a connection with the area. I do wonder what he would think about the art world’s current obsession with non-fungible tokens (NFTs) though, especially as he often referred to any style of art created after the 1900s (think Surrealism, Cubism or contemporary) simply as a load of rubbish.
NFTs have currently taken the world by storm, mainly thanks to one Mike Winkelmann, a digital artist from Wisconsin who goes by the name Beeple. When not being a dad and driving a Toyota Corolla, he deals with pixels and not paints. And last month, a piece of digital art he created called ‘Everydays: The First 5000 Days’ sold at auction for USD69 million.
Just so we’re all on the same page, digital art doesn’t physically exist. You can’t look at it in an art gallery (unless you’re looking at a computer screen), touch it or stick it in a frame. Up until a few years ago, the very fact that a painting
