The value of this art is all hot air.
A Brooklyn film director is mocking and at the same time trying to favor the cryptocurrency craze for non-fungible characters (NFTs) by selling a year’s audio clips that have been quarantined.
“If people sell digital art and GIFs, why don’t they sell boats?” Alex Ramírez-Mallis, 36, told The Post about his grateful addition to the blockchain-based NFT market.
His NFT, ‘One Calendar Year of Recorded Farts’, began to flourish in March 2020 when Ramírez-Mallis and four of his friends, at the beginning of the worldwide exclusion of the coronavirus, began recording their pictures on a group chat on To share WhatsApp.
On the one-year anniversary of the American COVID-19 quarantine this month – at which point Ramírez-Mallis said he could only identify members of the group by their clout alone – Ramírez-Mallis and his fellow farters 52 compiled. -minute “Master Collection” audio file.
The highest bid for the file is currently $ 183.
Individual fart recordings are also available for 0.05 Ethereum, or about $ 85 per pop. The gaseous group has so far sold one to an anonymous buyer.
“As the value increases, they can have an extremely valuable shot on their hands,” he said.
Ramírez-Mallis and his friends did not start thinking about their pigs profitably, but the recent NFT frenzy – which sold the ownership of abstract assets for seven- and eight-digit price tags – was a ‘perfect place to to share ”Their large back catalog of clothes.
The ridiculousness of it all is not lost on the resident of Flatbush.
“The NFT craze is absurd – this idea of attaching value to something intangibly tangible,” Ramírez-Mallis said, referring to screenshots of screenshots and the concept of colors currently sold as NFTs. “These NFTs are not even stimuli, but only digital alphanumeric strings that represent ownership.”
The novelty of NFTs has made the concept of selling the idea of ownership somehow tasty and profitable to the many online masses, he added. Indeed, he is not even the only person selling fart NFTs.
Although he is aware that the concept has manifested in madness, he still hopes to benefit from it.
‘I hope these NFT stimuli can be immediately criticized [the absurdity]”Make people laugh and make me rich,” he said.
But, he admits, there is a historical precedent for the concept of NFTs.
“In many ways it is a bubble, but it also exists forever,” he said. He compares NFTs to rich art collectors who buy expensive works, store them and display only their certificate of ownership and then sell them for more money. “Buying and selling art purely as a commodity to store value has been around for centuries, and NFTs are only a digital way of representing the transactional nature of art.”
“Art is just an avatar for value.”
A consultant from Ramírez-Mallis’s fart NFT agrees and said that he offered to help Ramírez-Mallis with some of the technical aspects of the project, because he appreciates the “foolish but necessary” criticism of the NFT phenomenon .
“By purchasing an NFT, you become part of the crowd of a technological innovation that pretends to be revolutionary but works in the same tired old way as the existing art market,” said Grayson Earle, a friend of Ramírez-Mallis and creator of the cryptocurrency project Bail Bloc.
While Ramírez-Mallis and Earle acknowledge that the digital art behind NFTs is often intellectually and visually fascinating, no matter how fast they go about their price more than their creative value.
“Art is just an avatar for value,” Ramírez-Mallis said, noting that behind the crazy market are not digital art lovers, but people who are rapidly trying to get rich as speculators.
“There’s the old saying, ‘Why don’t they just deposit the money?’ “” Ramírez-Mallis said, “and that is really the embodiment of it. ”