Famous Rapper Ja Rule announced that he is selling Fyre Festival’s corporate logo as a Non-Fungible token (NFT). Partnering with a team of software engineers, the Always on Time star is now the head of artists and repertoire for the digital art platform Flipkick, which focuses on selling physical works of art as NFTs.
The 48-inch-by-60-inch, oil-paint portrait of the fest’s corporate logo has hung in his New Jersey mansion since the company’s Manhattan headquarters closed several years ago. It’ll be sold on a new NFT exchange, Flipkick, focusing on selling NFTs, that are part digital, part physical objects. Most NFTs are purely digital—often virtual artwork and its accompanying blockchain ownership record. But many of the ones sold on Flipkick, including Ja Rule’s, will feature a digital ledger entry for a real-life item. Bidding for his Fyre Festival portrait begins with a reserve price set at $600,000, meaning, it won’t trade hands for anything less than that.
For Flipkick, Ja Rule will probably try to convince his celebrity friends to sell their own NFTs. Like much of the rest of the world, “I heard about NFTs [first] maybe like, a couple of weeks ago,” admits Ja Rule. “I wasn’t too educated on them, and I’m still learning a lot about it….I think people got a little bit tired of the regular stocks-and-bonds way of investing.”
The portrait’s sale amounts to something like a meta comment on manias. When the Fyre Festival started its initial marketing, it attracted a frenzy of eager attendees, lured by the promise of a Caribbean bacchanal with luxury accommodations and top-notch musical performances.
When they first began planning the carnival, Ja Rule commissioned an artist he found off Instagram to commemorate the occasion, paying the aptly named @Tripp_Art, a.k.a. South Carolina-based Tripp Derick Barnes, around $2,000 to splash rainbow paint across the festival’s logo. Before a friend suggested turning it into an NFT, he considered simply listing it on eBay.