Christie's will sell a non-fungible token (NFT) in New York next week of a white man being sold as a slave. The price for the digital-art-print is speculated in the millions.
"It was immediately clear it would be a major artwork both for its contemporary and historical commentary as well as the fascinating combination of disciplines," Christie's Barrett White said, according to the New York Post.
The NFT "White Male for Sale," which can be seen on the artist Dread Scott's Instagram, shows a white man on a block as black pedestrians walk behind him.
"The White Male for Sale NFT makes the medium itself an inherent and essential part of the conceptual project," Scott, 56, said on his Instagram. "People are inherently non-fungible. But as slavery became an integral part of developing capitalism, enslavers sought to turn people into commodities and make them fungible."
According to MCN, "an NFT is a unique piece of data on a blockchain. Because of their unique identifiers, NFT[s] are being used to secure digital certificates of ownership of artworks. It's important to understand that an NFT is not:
- An artwork—digital or otherwise
- Rights—to copy, disseminate, or display the artwork
- Exclusive versions of the JPG that serve as the digital surrogate for physical art
NFTS are at their core high-priced JSON wall labels."
As Twitterer @jonty puts it, "in short... NFT's are built on... [a] house of cards constructed by the people selling them. It is likely that _every_ NFT sold so far will be broken within a decade. Will that make them worthless? Hard to say."
Christie's in March sold an NFT from artist Mike Winkelmann, aka Beeple, for $69 million. And for Scott, he estimates his work could fetch a price north of $2 million.
Christie's will auction "White Male for Sale" on Oct. 1 at 20 Rockefeller Plaza.
But according to Manhattan painter David Paul Kay, NFTs are "cheap" and "ridiculous."
"He is just trying to cash out," Kay said of Scott. "This is not fixing the problem he is talking about. It's literally making it worse. This guy is just an opportunist. I don't like to bash other artists. I don't like to do that."
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