AN Irish conceptual artist who once sold a picture of a potato for €1m has made a similar amount of money from the sale of digital artworks over the past month.
Kevin Abosch, an artist, photographer and technology entrepreneur, yesterday sold his most recent non-fungible token (NFT) piece for €188,000. .
NFTs are digital stamps that verify virtual artefacts as being unique due to a ‘blockchain’ identifier.
The NFT art market has taken off this year, with the artist Beeple selling an NFT-verified digital canvas for €60m through auctioneer Christie’s in March.
Last week, Twitter founder Jack Dorsey sold his first tweet for $2.9m using an NFT.
Mr Abosch is no stranger to premium art collectors, and his €1m still life of a potato was one of the most expensive photos ever sold.
He has also collaborated with the Chinese artist Al Weiwei, while his 250 photo portraits of Irish people became a familiar sight to arriving visitors in Dublin Airport’s Terminal Two a decade ago.
In recent years, he has become one of Europe’s most successful emerging crypto artists, previously selling a single piece in 2018 for almost €1m on the Ethereum blockchain.
An NFT is a unique, uncopyable digital stamp attached to a virtual item. In the recent months, traded NFT work has included a 60-second video by the artist and singer Grimes, a Gif based on the Nyan Cat animation, thousands of sports trading cards and multiple stickers and pins from the musician Deadmau5.
They can be bought and sold via marketplaces such as MakersPlace, used by Christie’s in the Beeple art sale, Nifty Gateway and OpenSea, which is used by Mr Abosch.
Opensea has raised $23m from investors on the back of interest in trading NFTs.
NFT work can be stored in a digital wallet on a computer or in a hosted wallet.
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