The value of this art is all the hot air.
A Brooklyn-based film director scoffs and simultaneously tries to take advantage of the fashion of cryptocurrencies for non-expendable tokens (NFTs) by selling quarantined one-year-old fart audio clips.
“If people sell digital art and GIFs, why not sell farts?” Alex Ramirez-Mallis, 36, told The Post about his wet incorporation into the blockchain-based NFT market.
His NFT, “One Year Year of Recorded Farts,” began incubating in March 2020 when, at the start of the global coronavirus shutdown, Ramirez-Mallis and four of his friends began sharing recordings of their farts in a chat. group on WhatsApp.
On the one-year anniversary of the U.S. COVID-19 quarantine this month, when Ramirez-Mallis said he could dare to identify members of the group only with his farts, Ramirez-Mallis and the his fellow comrades compiled the recordings into a 52-minute “Master Collection” audio file.
Now, the main bid for the file is currently $ 183.
Individual fart recordings are also available for 0.05 Ethereum, or about $ 85 per star. The gas group has so far sold one to an anonymous buyer.
“If the value goes up, they could have an extremely valuable fart in their hands,” he said.
Ramirez-Mallis and his friends didn’t start taxing their little ones with the benefits in mind, but the recent NFT madness (which has seen the ownership of abstract assets sold for seven- and eight-digit price tags ) provided the “perfect starting point” His large back fart catalog.
The ridiculousness of all this is not lost on the Flatbush resident.
“NFT’s mania is absurd: this idea of valuing something intrinsically intangible,” Ramirez-Mallis said, referring to screenshots of screenshots and the concept of colors currently sold as NFT. “These NFTs aren’t even farts, they’re just digital alphanumeric strings that represent ownership.”
The trend of NFTs has made the concept of selling the idea of ownership somehow enjoyable and profitable for the very online masses, he continued. In fact, he’s not even the only person selling fart NFT.
Despite being aware that the concept has manifested itself in a madness, Ramírez-Mallis still hopes to take advantage of it.
“I hope these NFT farts can be criticized at the same time [the absurdity], make people laugh and make me rich, ”he said.
But, he admits, there is some historical precedent for the concept of NFT.
“In many ways, this is a bubble, but it has also existed forever,” he said, comparing NFTs to wealthy art collectors who bought expensive works, kept them and just showed their certificate of ownership and sold this for more money. “The buying and selling of art exclusively as a commodity to store value has existed for centuries and NFTs are just a digital way of representing this transactional nature of art.”
“Art is just an avatar of value.”
A Ramírez-Mallis pet NFT consultant agrees and said he offered to help Ramírez-Mallis with some technical aspects of the project because he appreciated his “silly but necessary” criticisms of the NFT phenomenon.
“By buying an NFT, you will become part of the crowd of a technological novelty that becomes revolutionary but works in the same tired way as the existing art market,” said Grayson Earle, a friend of Ramirez-Mallis and creator of the cryptocurrency project Bail Blog.
While Ramírez-Mallis and Earle admit that the digital art behind NFTs is often intellectually and visually fascinating, they worry about how quickly they become much more about its price than its creative value. .
“Art is just an avatar of value,” Ramírez-Mallis said, noting that behind the crazy market there are no digital art lovers, but people trying to get rich quick as speculators.
“There’s that old saying,‘ Why don’t they frame the money? “” Ramirez-Mallis said, “and that’s really the embodiment of that.”