Blockchain company BurntBanksy recently bought a $95,000 Banksy artwork, just to set it on fire! The goal was to take art in the physical world and bring in into the digital world as something called an NFT (non-fungible token). The company stated âWe view this burning event as an expression of art itself, and we specifically chose a Banksy piece since he has previously shredded one of his own artworks at an auction.â The company is selling the piece on an NFT website called OpenSea, where the current offer is on 2 ETH ($7,357).
deftly turning 95 grand into 7 like any crypto scheme worth itâs salt
Amazing. Itâs like a metaphor for itself.
[tweet by Yup That Exists @yup.that.exists: Blockchain company burns $95,000 original Banksy piece, in order for it to truly live on in the digital world as an NFT.]
The art piece, titled Morons, is a screen-print created in 2006 and depicts an auctioneer conducting a sale to a room packed with bidders over a painting that merely contains the text:  I canât believe you morons actually buy this shit
The art is a satirical take on the contemporary art market, which Banksy blames for the sky-high prices that many artists, including Banksy himself, are able to generate. which is neatly summed up by what his print company say about it on the pieceâs webpage  "Banksy makes a crap picture about how people pay a lot of money for crap pictures, which someone then ends up paying a lot of money for. A portion of irony eating itself, anyone?â
100 unsigned copies of Morons were sold during the original exhibit for $500 each. A year later Banksyâs company used the same original screen print stencil to create 500 more unsigned copies in different colours, 150 signed ones in monochrome, and 300 on a sepia background.
The one that BurntBanksy bought was purportedly the copy that was hanging on the gallery wall. Not that that matters anything to the owners of the other 1050 versions of the same picture. Also, the image of it I just posted was a scan made for the sale of the gallery piece, which makes it more of an âoriginalâ digital version of the art than the photo being sold on OpenSea.
