We Regret to Inform You That Grimes Just Sold $5.8 Million Worth of Her NFT Crypto Art in Less Than 20 Minutes

The Canadian musician and artist sold her work on Nifty Gateway.

Canadian singer-songwriter Grimes at the world premiere of "Captain Marvel" in Hollywood, California, on March 4, 2019. Photo Robyn Beck/AFP via Getty Images.

Canadian musician Grimes just got $5.8 million richer by selling a suite of her artworks in the form of NFTs (non-fungible tokens), the latest blockchain craze.

The digital artworks were published as “WarNymph Collection Vol. 1,” and launched on Sunday via a tweet to her 1.1 million Twitter followers. They sold out within 20 minutes, reports Insider.

The works went on sale via the NFT platform Nifty Gateway, which was founded by the Winkelvoss twins. Some of the works are accompanied by original musical compositions with titles like Ærythe, Mars Theme, and Anhedonia.

Grimes, who was born Claire Boucher (no relation to the author, as far as I know!), collaborated with her brother Mac Boucher in creating the works. The imagery includes a winged and tattooed baby floating in space and, strikingly for those who followed the great monolith mystery of 2020, an image of cherubs and piglets orbiting around a monolith coated in butterflies.

Another image shows a baby protecting Mars, which has been in the news because Grimes’s boyfriend, tech entrepreneur Elon Musk, wants to send humans there. (There is also an artist on the team currently conducting rover research on the planet.)

 

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Grimes debuted her artworks last year in a digital show jointly presented with Los Angeles dealer Michele Maccarone and GalleryPlatform.LA. At the time, she said she was an artist before she was a musician. The show included a work that involved legally offering a share of her soul, and introduced the War Nymph, which was created from a scan of her own body. She created the avatar as a stand-in partly due to her aversion to posing for photo shoots.

Some of the proceeds from the NFT sales will go to Carbon180, an NGO dedicated to reducing carbon emissions.

Musk recently surpassed Jeff Bezos to become the world’s wealthiest person, with a net worth of $185 billion.


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