Bitcoin? At record levels. Artificial intelligence? Yes, please. Data centres? The hottest thing going. And NFTs, the art industry’s entree to the world of the future? Eh, not so much. Four years since the world was awash with images of cartoon apes costing hundreds of thousands of dollars, and non-fungible tokens were being inserted into everything from handbags to diamonds, the dream is struggling along.
Here are some shocking numbers. One cryptocurrency trader outlaid $US69.3 million ($106 million) for a single piece of NFT, a piece known as Everydays: The First 5000 Days, by American artist Mike Winkelmann, or Beeple. That was March 2021, and the piece was the first NFT artwork ever to be offered by a major auction house, on this occasion Christie’s. The total value of NFT transactions reached $US57 billion in 2022.
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