Phillips’ My Kawaii Valentine sale gives us MonoC, virtual influencer who will make NFT art in response to auction bids
- MonoC will take bids from the My Kawaii Valentine sale that auctioneer Phillips launches on Valentine’s Day and turn them into a piece of NFT art
- A selfie-taking Eurasian beauty with long hair who wears stilettos, browses for rare books and quotes Hemingway but has lousy grammar, MonoC is very lifelike
The young woman in the Instagram selfies is probably of post-college age and has the best-of-both-worlds good looks of mixed East Asian and Caucasian parentage. She poses with art a lot, drinks nothing but “premium coffee”, hunts for first editions at Lok Man Rare Books, and name-drops all the designer brands that have dressed her for a fashion shoot.
You can tell what kind of image @mo.noc is going for: a beauty-with-brains with leisure and money, a typical art lover.
Girlie-girl (long hair, stiletto heels, loves pink flowers) falls short on a number of fronts. She can quote Hemingway but her grammar is terrible. And the attempt at sophistication is undermined by a number of gratuitous, sexy shots. And so one must conclude that she is a poseur, also known as an influencer.
This is not a personal attack, because there is no such person. @mo.noc (actual name MonoC) is a “virtual influencer” created by Hong Kong marketing company Gusto Collective for Phillips, the auction house. MonoC, who is very lifelike, is described as an artist who will “make” a piece of NFT art by feeding the bids received for an upcoming auction into a computer algorithm.
