Sixty-five years ago, the renowned French artist Yves Klein decided to sell conceptual art pieces that lacked specific material value. His work is famous rain recordings, for the creation of which he held a blank canvas in the rain while driving a car at a hundred kilometers per hour. The result was a highly applauded piece.
One of his most famous exhibitions is the one he organized in 1958, at the Iris Clert gallery in Paris, entitled: The specialization of sensitivity in the state of raw materials in stabilized pictorial sensitivity: the void. The exhibition consisted of painting all the surfaces of the gallery blue. The walls were painted blue, the windows were painted blue, and to enter, you had to cross a blue curtain. Everything that was part of the gallery was blue, but there was nothing on display in it. The artwork was to paint the gallery blue. And it was a critical and public success: thousands of people paid to enter an empty room, whose peculiarity was its color, a deep and dense blue, like overseas, which would be present in many other works by the artist. Today, it is still widely used in the world of fashion and design. Klein blue.
Yves Klein’s intention was always to provoke a reaction. He wanted to make fun of conventions, to develop anti-art in all its variants. In 1947, for example, he composed his first symphony, the Monotone Symphony, which consisted of a chord held for twenty minutes followed by another twenty minutes of silence. On another occasion, he announced that he had written a book, but it turned out that, instead of a novel or an essay on art, he wrote a manual on the fundamentals of judo. His purpose, deep down, was to turn the world upside down. And profit from it.
Among his most appreciated works were the so-called Zones of immaterial pictorial sensitivity, which became a thriving business for Klein. These were especially beautiful corners of Paris located by the artist, and from them he sold a certain visual perspective. A panoramic view of the Seine, a backlit balcony from a street corner, and so on. He sold a look at that space, a determined framing of a place with a high pictorial sensitivity. Or, put another way: he sold the air. He sold the void. The nothing. But he sold it in exchange for a large sum of money and the collection was made only in gold bars. In exchange, the buyer obtained a receipt certifying that this zone of immaterial pictorial sensitivity belonged to him. I mean, he hadn’t bought anything at all, but he had a receipt showing that he had bought it. The fact that? Nothing.
But there was something else: as part of the process, the artist asked those who bought that empty space to burn their receipt right there. It was part of the ritual: the buyer would pay an awful lot for something that didn’t exist, receive in exchange a piece of paper that he certified as the owner of a piece of nothing at all, and then burn that paper. In return, Klein threw the ingots received into the bottom of the Seine River. But not all, only half. In other words: a lot of people gave another half of his gold and threw the rest into the river. A round move for which he became rich and stupid for which he was throwing money away from him. Exactly the same as it happens with these valuable immaterial pieces of the 21st century that are the NFTs.
In March 2021, Jack Dorsey, creator of Twitter, asked his followers if they wanted to buy the first publication in the history of that social network. It was a tweet from Jack himself that said: “Just setting up my twttr” (configuring my twitter). He put it up for sale in the form of an NFT and, following an auction on the Valuables platform, cryptocurrency investor Sina Estavi bought it for $2.9 million. I just checked right now on OpenSea how much that NFT-turned-tweet is currently selling for, and it’s worth $2,300. A nice way to throw almost three million dollars into the river. Although, at least, the guy keeps two thousand three hundred, which is already more than what those who bought an area of immaterial pictorial sensibility in Paris from Yves Klein have.
During a conference in the year 2022, Bill Gates said that NFTs are governed entirely by the theory that there is always someone dumber to sell them to. When is, therefore, the best time to invest in NFTs? When you’re foolish enough to pay someone else for them, whenever you’ve found someone else, even more foolish, who wants to buy them from you.
2023-08-05 19:03:02
#invest #NFT
