The value of this art is all the hot air.
A Brooklyn-based filmmaker is making fun of himself and trying to take advantage of the insanity of non-fungible token (NFT) cryptocurrencies by selling quarantined fart audio clips for a year.
“If people sell digital art and GIFs, why not sell farts?” Alex Ramirez-Mallis, 36, told The Post about his wet addition to the blockchain-based NFT market.
His NFT, “A Calendar Year of Registered Farts,” began incubating in March 2020, when Ramírez-Mallis and four of his friends began sharing their fart records in a chat of group on WhatsApp.
On the one-year anniversary of the US COVID-19 quarantine this month – a time when Ramírez-Mallis said he could almost dare to identify members of the group only with their farts – Ramírez-Mallis and his fellow farters have compiled the recordings in a -minutes the audio file “Master Collection”.
The bid for this file is currently $ 183.
Individual pet recordings are also available for 0.05 Ethereum, or about $ 85 per pop. The gas group has so far sold one to an anonymous buyer.
“If the value goes up, he could have an extremely valuable fart on his hands,” he said.
Ramírez-Mallis and his friends didn’t start recording their farts with the thought of profit, but the recent madness of NFT – which has seen ownership of abstract assets sell for seven- and eight-figure prices – offered “the perfect way out for sharing. “Their big back farts catalog.
Everyone’s ridicule is not lost on the Flatbush resident.
“NFT madness is absurd – this idea of highlighting something inherently intangible,” said Ramírez-Mallis, referring to the screenshots of screenshots and the concept of colors that are currently sold as NFTs. “These NFTs aren’t even farts, they’re just digital alphanumeric strings that represent property.”
He continued, the trend of NFTs has made the concept of selling the idea of ownership in a way pleasant and profitable for the masses very online. Indeed, he is not even the only person selling fart NFTs.
Although aware that the concept has gone crazy, Ramírez-Mallis still hopes to take advantage of it.
“I hope these NFT farts can be criticized simultaneously [the absurdity], it makes people laugh and enriches me, ”he said.
But, he admits, there is a historical precedent for the concept of NFT.
“In many ways, this is a balloon, but it has existed forever,” he said, comparing NFTs to wealthy art collectors who buy expensive works, put them in storage, and display only their certificate of ownership, then I’m selling for more money. “Buying and selling art only as a commodity for storing value has existed for centuries, and NFTs are just a digital way of representing that transactional nature of art.”
“Art is just an avatar for value.”
A consultant for Ramírez-Mallis’ NFT fart agrees and said he offered to help Ramírez-Mallis with some of the technical aspects of the project, as he appreciated his “stupid but necessary” criticisms 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 of the existing art market,” said Grayson Earle, a friend of Ramirez-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, they question how quickly they become much more about their price than their creative value.
“Art is just an avatar for value,” said Ramirez-Mallis, noting that behind the crazy market are not digital art lovers, but people trying to get rich quick as speculators.
“There is an old saying, ‘Why doesn’t money fit in?’ “Ramírez-Mallis said,” and this is really the embodiment of this. “