And this is also the place where, thanks to the cryptographic innovations that made the digital currency bitcoin possible, it is increasingly being bought and sold. We’re stuck inside, gazing at our screens, which is just the place where digital art can be seen. Behind him, as we chat via Zoom, is his video-conferencing backdrop: a huge screen that’s currently showing No Longer Dead by Jonathan Monaghan, in which a unicorn prances through a surreal landscape. “What we’re witnessing is a tipping point for digital art,” says Rob Anders, CEO of Niio, a streaming platform that hosts more than 15,000 digital artworks. The real world … a collection of short video pieces made by Grimes made $6m in 20 minutes last month. “We specifically chose a Banksy piece since he has previously shredded one of his own artworks at an auction.” “We view this burning event as an expression of art itself,” Injective Protocol executive Mirza Uddin said. The burning of Morons (White) is thought to be one of the first times a physical artwork has been replaced by a unique digital asset. This is called crypto art and, if you want to know the extent to which it’s booming, well, the new work just went for $382,336, more than four times the original price.įrom Ai Weiwei smashing a 2,000-year-old vase to the Chapman brothers defacing Goya prints, artists are no strangers to creative destruction. Last week masked men set fire to a Banksy screenprint called Morons (White) at a secret location in Brooklyn, livestreaming the destruction via the Twitter account The men worked for a company called Injective Protocol, which bought the print for $95,000 in order to destroy it and replace it with a unique digital facsimile.

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