For Art Basel 2019, Italian artist Maurizio Cattelan taped an ordinary banana to the gallery wall. For $120,000, he marketed it as "Comedian." It was unnecessary for the purchasers to be concerned about a decaying banana as this was not included in the transaction. There were directions on how to attach the fruit on the correct angle and height to a wall in the certificate of authenticity they had paid for.
South Florida has become an incubator for an entirely new breed of kitschy art in the wake of Cattelan's win. Because of the mayor, the city has become a crypto epicenter. This is also where the Bored Ape Yacht Club was born, a collection of NFTs (non-fungible tokens) established in spring 2021 by a business named Yuga Labs. At a cost of $190(0.08 ether), it took 12 hours to sell out the 10,000 available units. This bundle was once a bargain, but in July, the price of Bored Ape NFTs skyrocketed.
The success of NFT collections is largely dependent on the collector's personal preferences. For the most part, it's a combination of four factors: celebrity or influencer participation, mainstream potential, utility for members and community appeal. They argue that NFTs are greater status symbols than real-world things since they may be viewed by millions of people on Twitter and Instagram when used as profile pictures.
NFT art can be divided into two broad categories. Non-fungible tokens, like digital artworks in the art world, can be sold as a first step. It's reminiscent of the Beeple NFTs that sold at Christie's for as much as $69 million. The Bored Ape Yacht Club NFT collections, are also available for your use. More and more money is being spent on this style, and it's becoming the dominant one.
Animated apes of various colors, facial emotions, and clothes can be found in each NFT. For example, a leopard-print ape with a rainbow-colored grill in its grinning mouth; another ape is brown, neatly shaved, and wearing sunglasses. The BAYC made about $2 million in its first year of operation. Prices rose after that. More than $24 million was raised at Sotheby's auction for a collection of 107 primates. Among the growing list of well-known proponents are Gwyneth Paltrow, Eminem, Shaquille O'Neal, Post Malone, Snoop Dogg, Mark Cuban, and Steph Curry. When Jimmy Fallon and Paris Hilton discussed ape ownership on The Tonight Show recently, their talk had the stilted, cheerful cadence of a poor advertisement. They'd spent more than $500,000 to join the club.
NFTs continue to irritate and annoy their critics, who have numerous solid reasons to despise them as they become more commonplace. The majority of these tokens are traded on the Ethereum blockchain, which consumes an enormous amount of energy; purchasing and selling NFTs can make private-jetting around the world to pick up Picassos look delightfully green in comparison. More than 80% of the NFTs minted utilizing the free option on a leading marketplace were spam, fakes, or plagiarized work, according to a recent announcement from the company. Even so-called "genuine" NFT projects can smell like multi-level marketing, as collectors push others to join in the action with the alarming intensity of a formerly normal acquaintance who is now constantly pitching oils on Instagram. The only way to make money from a certificate of authenticity for a digital image of an ape is if someone else is willing to pay more than you paid for it. Then, of course, there's the fact that they're just ignorant.
