The musician and artist Grimes is the latest artist to get in on the NFT gold rush, selling around $6 million worth of digital artworks. A series of 10 pieces, some one of a kind, others with thousands of copies, went up for sale on Nifty Gateway.
Grimes, whose real name is Claire Boucher, announced the auction on Twitter a day before the collection went on sale. The series was created with the help of Grimes’s brother Mac Boucher. The highest-selling piece was a one-of-a-kind video called “Death of the Old”. The video includes flying cherubs, a cross, a sword, and glowing light that’s set to an original song by Grimes. Four bidders engaged in a bidding war and the piece was finally sold for nearly $400,000.
Two of the works, short video pieces called Earth and Mars, were made available as large editions at a fixed price of $7,500 (£5,400). The video features their titular planet with a giant cherub over it holding a weapon, also set to original music. Nearly 700 copies were sold till the sales closed summing up to nearly $5.18 million.
All the pieces were sold as NFTs, a branch of the cryptocurrency sector that allows for artworks and other media to be “tokenized” and sold through similar mechanisms to digital assets such as bitcoin.