In July, it was estimated that sales of NFTs in the first half of 2021 rose by more than $2bn (£1.47bn) – a trend that prompted Christie’s and Sotheby’s to host their own NFT auctions and that is credited with driving contemporary art sales to an all-time high.
Are they a vital cultural product that tells us something profound about digital consumerism? Or are they just the latest cynical way to make absurd amounts of money?Ī motley crew of celebrities have tried their hand at selling digital art, including Snoop Dogg, Lindsay Lohan and John Cleese. While most of us are still trying to remember what “fungible” means, a battle is under way to define how NFTs are understood. To detractors, from critic Waldemar Januszczak to artist David Hockney, the NFT marketplace is a home for morally bankrupt, environmentally vandalistic money-grabbers whose creations barely qualify as art. Yet Hilton’s endorsement may also be ammunition for those who view the NFT as just another depressing example of the speculative logic of finance monopolising taste. Pink, jewel-encrusted, and openly motivated by being as rich and famous as humanly possible, she’s a far cry from the type of person whose work is typically exhibited in blue-chip galleries or hung in booths at art fairs. In this context, the relevance of Hilton’s brand to the NFT movement makes sense. To advocates of the NFT, the technology offers a revolutionary new way of selling art, and of circumventing snooty cultural gatekeepers whose resistance to a crypto future seems as square as the 19th-century Parisian art world’s disdain for impressionism.
(Ethereum produces ether, the currency in which the majority of NFTs are traded.) Since then she’s thrown herself into collecting crypto art, and owns more than 150 NFTs. “I became friends with the founders of Ethereum,” she says. Hilton first started investing in cryptocurrency in 2016. Paris Hilton worked with the artist Blake Kathryn to create a digital tribute to her chihuahua Tinkerbell. These include a video of a chihuahua on top of a rotating ionic column (a tribute to her deceased pet Tinkerbell) and an animated self-portrait of Hilton as a sparkling CGI Barbie floating in the clouds, a piece she’s called Iconic Crypto Queen, and which she sold in April for more than $1m. Sure enough, at Hilton’s Beverly Hills mansion there are screens displaying NFTs she made in collaboration with the digital artist Blake Kathryn. I have these screens in my house where I display them.” “You can have it on your computer server or your phone. “NFT stands for non-fungible token, a digital token that is redeemable for a digital piece of art,” she explains. When we speak, Hilton has just returned from a bitcoin conference in Miami, where customers paid up to $25,000 for VIP tables at the opening party to watch her DJ in a pair of diamanté-encrusted headphones.
Yet in the past year she’s become a surreal figurehead in the NFT scene: a world flush with crypto dollars and high on a promise to transform the worlds of art and commerce.
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