The value of this art is hot air.
A Brooklyn film director is simultaneously mocking and trying to cash in on the cryptocurrency craze for non-fungible tokens (NFTs) by selling quarantined, one-year audio clips.
“If people are selling digital art and GIFs, why not sell farts?” Alex Ramírez-Mallis, 36, told The Post about his humid addition to the blockchain-based NFT market.
His NFT, “A calendar year of registered farts,” began to incubate in March 2020 when, at the start of the global coronavirus blockade, Ramírez-Mallis and four of his friends started sharing recordings of their farts in a chat at group on WhatsApp.
On the one-year anniversary of the United States’ COVID-19 quarantine this month – when Ramírez-Mallis said he could almost identify the group members just by their farts – Ramírez-Mallis and his fellow farters compiled the recordings on a 52 one-minute “Master Collection” audio file.
Now, the highest bid for the file is currently $ 183.
Recordings of individual farts are also available for 0.05 Ethereum, or about $ 85 a pop. The gas group has so far sold one, to an anonymous buyer.
“If the value goes up, they may have an extremely valuable fart on their hands,” he said.
Ramírez-Mallis and his friends did not start registering their farts with the profit in mind, but the recent NFT madness – which saw abstract asset ownership being sold by seven- and eight-digit price tags – provided the “perfect outlet for share ”Your large catalog of farts.
The ridiculousness of all this did not go unnoticed by the resident of Flatbush.
“The NFT craze is absurd – this idea of valuing something inherently intangible,” said Ramírez-Mallis, referring to screenshots and the concept of colors that are currently being sold as NFTs. “These NFTs are neither farting, they are just digital alphanumeric strings that represent ownership.”
The NFT trend has made the concept of selling the idea of ownership palatable and profitable to the masses online, he continued. In fact, he is not even the only person who sells farts NFTs.
Although aware that the concept has become crazy, Ramírez-Mallis still hopes to profit from it.
“I hope that these NFT farts will be able to criticize at once [the absurdity], make people laugh and make me rich, ”he said.
But, he admits, there is some historical precedent for the concept of NFTs.
“In many ways, this is a bubble, but it’s been around forever,” he said, comparing NFTs to rich art collectors who buy expensive works, store and display only their certificates of ownership, and then sell for more money. “Buying and selling art purely as a commodity to store value has been around for centuries, and NFTs are just a digital way of representing the transactional nature of art.”
“Art is just a worthwhile avatar.”
A consultant for the Ramírez-Mallis NFT fart agrees and said that he offered to help Ramírez-Mallis with some of the technical aspects of the project because he appreciated his “foolish but necessary” criticism of the NFT phenomenon.
“When you buy an NFT, you become part of the crowd of a technological novelty that disguises itself as revolutionary, but operates in the same way as the existing art market,” said Grayson Earle, a friend of Ramírez-Mallis and creator of the project. Bail Bloc cryptocurrency.
Although Ramírez-Mallis and Earle admit that the digital art behind NFTs is often intellectually and visually fascinating, they question how quickly they become much more concerned with their price than with their creative value.
“Art is just a valuable avatar,” said Ramírez-Mallis, noting that behind the crazed market are not digital art lovers, but people who are trying to get rich quickly as speculators.
“There is that old saying, ‘Why don’t they just blame the money?’ “Ramírez-Mallis said,” and this really is the embodiment of that. “