How the NFT Frenzy is Scamming Artists and Collectors
The cryptoart hype is designed to help people get rich doing something morally reprehensible
Just a few weeks ago, few people outside the niche world of cryptocurrency trading knew what an NFT was. This changed about a month ago when celebrities like Grimes began producing their own NFTs. Then on March 11, the auction house Christie’s made headlines for selling a digital collage of 5000 images by the artist Mike Winkelmann (who uses the moniker Beeple) for $69.3 million. This staggering sum is the third highest price ever realized at auction for the sale of work by a living artist.
Beeple’s sale sparked a frenzy of speculation by individuals scrambling to cash in on what the artist himself called “absolutely” a bubble. The hype has been further fueled by celebrities like Lindsay Lohan and now Damien Hirst getting in on the action. A recent article by Margo Vansynghel for Crosscut profiles several Seattle-area artists who are using NFTs as a way to make money from their art — a prospect which has historically been elusive for digital artists, whose work often does not correspond to any physical object that can be bought and sold.
Technically speaking, it’s not the artwork itself being traded in these transactions, but rather an NFT— that is, a “non-fungible token” to which the digital artwork is…
