NFT Street Art & Hidden Banksys🕵️
Street artists are using NFTs to preserve their work, and how the wealthy hide their art
Cultured is a newsletter by Otis that gets readers up to speed on the most interesting things going on at the intersection of finance, art, collectibles, NFTs, and more.
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🗞 STORIES OF THE DAY
Street artists are turning to NFTs to save their work
Street art tends to have a short lifespan — it’s constantly getting whitewashed, demolished, or tagged up. By digitizing street murals, artists have figured out how to save their work and get paid at the same time.
Tech and street art have long gone hand-in-hand and many artists have found unique ways to connect the metaverse and the real world. NFTs are being used to crowdfund new mural projects, and some artists are giving out digital tokens when you visit their physical locations.
One of the most successful early projects is Murals to the Metaverse, which scanned works by six Bay Area street artists and converted them into 3D models. It then animated the murals and turned them into NFTs, saving them forever on the blockchain.
Our Take: As the market for street art grows, artists are embracing new technologies to make their ephemeral work into a collectible product.
In its earliest days, street art was a way for artists from underprivileged backgrounds to express themselves. Collectors found their work fascinating, turning it into a burgeoning industry. Now many of those artists are trying to figure out how they can make a living doing what they love. For street artists, NFTs present a low barrier to entry. More than that, they are a way to preserve the core goals of street art: open access and a democratic approach to art making.
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Where the wealthy hide their Banksys
Reporters working on the Pandora Papers found 1,600 works of art that were secretly traded by wealthy collectors, including more than a dozen Banksys. For those that don’t remember, the Pandora Papers were the leaks detailing how the rich use offshore tax havens to hide money.
Journalists sifting through the 12 million documents from the leak found out that Maurizio Fabris, a London financier, bought the Banksys through a trust. That deal gave him the right to display the works in his home at no cost, while skirting taxes.
This latest leak also revealed that a prominent antiquities dealer was using offshore accounts to illegally trade looted artifacts from Cambodia.
Our Take: The Pandora Papers have revealed a secret (and sometimes illegal) side of collecting.
The life of a Banksy (or any other important work) is a mystery to most people. After it’s sold, it is shipped off to a storage facility and hidden away. These leaks show how difficult it is to figure out exactly who owns a work. By using offshore trusts where taxes are low or non-existent, wealthy collectors also managed to save millions using loopholes that aren’t available to regular collectors. Blockchain contracts could help stop this — by making sales data public and traceable, we could avoid another Pandora Papers debacle.
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✨ AROUND THE INTERNET
The Air Jordan 1s that MJ wore at his infamous “broken foot” game sold for more than $400,000 at auction last week.
Want a lifetime pass to Coachella? You’ll have to snatch up one of 10 NFT keys that give you lifetime access to the music festival.
If you were in Central Park on Wednesday, you might have noticed a $12 million gold cube hanging out in the grass. Missed it? You can still buy the crypto token, which will give you access to an NFT of the cube.
The Biebs is officially a member of the Bored Ape Yacht Club. His Ape is pretty sad, leaving us to ask: you ok, Justin?
Farrah Fawcett’s classic red swimsuit poster (this one, you freaks) is being auctioned off as a limited-edition NFT.
A 1916 Babe Ruth card in near-mint condition is up for auction. The last time a similar one went under the hammer, it sold for $1.5 million.
An Idaho family renovating their house came upon a sports card collector’s dream: a wall with around 1,600 Topps cards from the 1970s and 1980s.
