fIf it’s true, if it’s more than vulgarity, it’s a legal matter. Florida-based crypto entrepreneur Martin Mobarak wants a work by Mexican painter Frida Kahlo burned so that it only exists virtually in the form of Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs) – a series of ownership certificates on a blockchain.
A video on YouTube is supposed to show the action, which is said to have been staged in July: You can see a pool party, at which a picture is taken out of a frame to the sounds of a mariachi band and is eaten by the flames in a cocktail glass on dry ice. On the website FRIDA.NFT it is listed under “Fantasmones siniestros” (uncanny spirits), identified as a sheet torn from a diary by Kahlo, on which the artist sketched fantastic beings in watercolor around 1944.
In 2015, Mobarak claims to have bought it from a private owner for ten million dollars. Now it shall be destroyed – or, as Mobarak says, rise like a phoenix from the ashes in ten thousand NFTs. At the price of three ethers each – almost four thousand dollars – these can be “minted”.
The fact that “a portion” of the proceeds will go to charity and the Museo Frida Kahlo in Coyoacan doesn’t make it any better. The Mexican Ministry of Culture is checking whether Mobarak burned an authentic work, because in Mexico the intentional destruction of a monument of art is a criminal offence. The lack of demand would hit the igniter harder and faster: If he stayed on the NFTs, he would have burned a lot of money, and it would serve him right.
In the alleged Kahlo burning, two heated market events are combined: there are the increases in value that the Mexican woman’s works have recently experienced. A self-portrait of Kahlo at Sotheby’s in New York cost $34.9 million in November 2021, which was available for $1.9 million in 1990. And there is the NFT bad habit, which is still popular despite the crypto crash, of destroying physical works for the sake of the tokens.
Images become confetti
Back in early 2021, activists burned a Banksy print, sold it as an NFT, and turned a profit. Damien Hirst, one of the most enthusiastic and successful contemporary artists playing with market mechanisms, has launched an art project called “The Currency” (the currency), which focuses on value-adding or value-destroying combustion. If you buy one of ten thousand images that look like banknotes with confetti print, you will receive it on paper – or as NFT, then the corresponding sheet will be burned. More than half of the buyers chose something tangible, but Hirst still has a lot to do when he starts the auto-da-fé on October 11 at the Frieze art fair in London.
Thanks to inflation, anyone can burn money, and by the way, there is also NFT art without destroying others for it. But if associations with book burning don’t bother you, please do, and if an artist holds the match to his own work, for our sake. Only Frida Kahlo can no longer have a say. Otherwise she would probably have prevented Mara de Anda Romeo, one of her great-grannies, from NFTing a brick from the artist’s Red House. For the metaverse.
