In 2018, Irish conceptual artist Kevin Abosch put his photograph, Forever Rose, on the NFT market. No physical photograph was ever sold. He created a token with the same name and that token represented his photograph. He divided it into ten shares, so ten people could own a fraction of the original token. He raised US$1 million dollars, which he then gave to charity. But it would be another few years before NFT photographs soared as a trend.
In October 2020, Mike Winkelmann, the digital artist known as Beeple, sold his first NFTs, a pair for US$66,666.66 each. In December, he sold a series for US $3.5 million. In February 2021, one of the NFTs that originally sold for $66,666.66 was resold for US$6.6 million. Then on March 11, 2021, he sold the NFT token for his collage, Everydays: the First 5000 Days, via Christie’s for US$69.3 million. The collage of 5,000 digital images was the first purely digital work of art ever offered by a major auction house. Its sale price was enormous. It made headlines. The trend has since been an explosion.
So, what exactly is an NFT? Quite simply, it’s a piece digital art ‘minted’ or created on the blockchain. Given the nature of blockchain, its provenance and entire sales history is a matter of public record. And each time an NFT is resold, the system allows for the artist to receive a commission of the sales price.
One of the world’s most powerful portrait photographers of our time, Platon, is also using NFTs. Perhaps his fame
