Crypto artists unlock value with Lambos and kitties
With more people questioning the actual worth of invisible assets unconnected to any traditional store of value, artists are now weighing in, raising their own questions about value
Last month, Michael Jackson, the venture capitalist and former Skype executive, spent US$400,000 on a 10-foot-long neon sign consisting of 42 yellow letters and numbers that make up the blockchain contract address of a crypto-themed work of art called “Yellow Lambo”.
Artist Kevin Abosch conceived it as a symbol of success, a way to physically manifest the wealth a digital coin can represent. Jackson doesn’t know whether the work is, or ever will be, worth the money. And yet this Yellow Lambo went for more than many real Lamborghinis.
“Crypto assets – they are so difficult to understand,” Jackson says. “A Lambo in real life is something the guys want to look up to. They are only doing it to show off, it symbolises wealth. But a token – no one can see it.”
Crytpocurrencies boast a market cap of US$430 billion, leading people to question the actual worth of invisible assets unconnected to any traditional store of value. So while Bitcoin appreciated 14-fold last year, billionaire investor Warren Buffett is still calling the currency “rat poison squared”. Now artists are weighing in, raising their own questions about value, ownership and crypto’s underlying technology.
When JPMorgan Chase chairman Jamie Dimon called crypto a “terrible store of value”, artist “cryptograffiti” responded with a piece with the same name. “Terrible Store of Value” is a portrait of a “disintegrating” Dimon – “mirroring the public’s trust toward traditional banking institutions”, according to cryptograffiti’s website – executed on a bank deposit box that’s connected to a Bitcoin wallet.
The piece sold for US$33,000 at auction this year. More works will go up for bid May 12 in a charity art auction at the Ethereal Summit in Maspeth, New York.
Blockchain, the ledger technology underlying many cryptocurrencies, has “huge potential” and is attracting dozens of established artists, says Christiane Paul, director of the Sheila C. Johnson Design Center at the New School’s Parsons School of Design in New York.
