When will it stop? What will be the digital straw to finally break the physical camel’s back? Surely, the end is nigh. I keep thinking it’s coming, but alas, we fall deeper and deeper into this vacuum of meaningless tripe.
Image credit: Stately Homes
The Times reports, in what it believes to be a world first, property developer Stately Homes is accompanying its new £29 million Hampton House listing with a non fungible token. In case the 11-bedrooms, the bowling alley, or the spa weren’t enough, they’re throwing in the copyrighted blueprint and virtual version of your home, to entice some more prospective buyers.
Fack offff. What utter pish. For £29m, I better damn-well get the copyrighted blueprint and virtual version of my house, regardless of if you call it a NFT. Forget owning the house in the metaverse, I’ve got the real thing, and you’d better believe if anyone is monetising digital tours of my £29m house, it’ll be me! You know what, if I had £29m lying about, I’d ask Stately Homes to round it up to £30m, on the condition they ditch all the NFT/metaverse crap from the sale, and just hand me the keys. Call me old fashioned.
OpenSea is the platform on which Stately Homes will list Hampton House. It brands itself as the world’s largest NFT marketplace, but has recently been embroiled in controversy, with 1,138 tokens removed from the site. The controversy centres over a project launched by ArtWars. Big name artists, including Damien Hirst and Anish Kapoor, have complained their permission was not given for NFT copies of their work. Mikk Roben – a regular NFT collector who bought into the ArtWars project – explained to The Art Newspaper that people who bought into the project, now “hold NFTs with no value and no future perspective.” Robben bought two of the Stormtrooper helmets launched by ArtWars. He paid in something called ETH and he paid 2.9 of those, worth around $10,400 at the time of sale. Unreal.
Sadly, it doesn’t seem the OpenSea/ArtWars controversy will end the fad; nor that this ludicrous house will topple the NFT empire. The worst part is, I bet the Hampton House listing will stimulate some tasteless crypto-bro, and fetch its £29m asking price. I suppose, for that wealthy, brainless cohort, Hampton House must be dreamland: a sprawling mansion and the short lived prestige that will come with purchasing this trailblazing pile of shite.
I realise NFTs have value. People who know far more about money, and make more in a day than I do in a year, are investing vast sums into them. There must be some logic. And artists have found another medium to be creative, and, in a way, NFTs offer a degree of individual ownership that I admire. And yet, I pray, hope and imagine that they go down in history as an embarrassing episode in human history when everyone temporarily lost their mind.
