Megan Fox Kelly on NFTs in The New York Times

Banksy's “Love Is in the Air” at auction on May 12, 2021, at Sotheby's. Credit: Nina Westervelt for The New York Times

New York Times reporter Robin Pogrebin reports on the purchase of Banksy’s painting Love Is in the Air and plans to sell off fragments of the artwork as NFTs to thousands of buyers at a fraction of the original purchase cost.

In her article, Cutting a Banksy Into 10,000 (Digital) Pieces (Dec 1, 2021) Pogrebin reports that the company Particle, founded in part by former Christie’s executive Loic Gouzer, purchased the artwork at auction for $12.9 million and the group now plans to sell 10,000 fragments of the work as NFTs, “allow[ing] a much wider audience to be part of a collecting experience” stated the executive.

NFTs have grown in influence in the market in 2020, since the landmark sale of the digital artist Beeple’s work Everydays: The First 5,000 Days for $69 million at a Christie’s online auction in May . The sale of digital artworks now accounts for one-third of online sales in volume, or, two percent of the overall art market according the Artprice database. With the rise in NFT sales we see the creation of consortiums angling to collectively purchase these digital pieces in order to own a slice of a particular artwork.

But many remain skeptical of NFTs their ability to maintain value as vehicles for investment. Quoted in Pogrebin’s article, Megan Fox Kelly stated, “A work of art is a unique object and collectors who love art want to own the object itself…The NFT is a separate entity from the object. I think we’re still in very early days of understanding how these’s NFTs exist as works of art…Right now they appear to be investment vehicles, with potentially significant returns, and the conversations around them are focused on that.”

Read the full article by Robin Pogrebin here.