Narine Arakelian is an Armenian multimedia artist, and her latest work, a painting called Love, Hope, Live, will be auctioned off as both a physical creation and a non-fungible token (NFT) of the painting.
This is not the first time that a work of art has been sold as an NFT, a piece of unique digital media that can be tracked on blockchain. But this won’t be just a regular NFT—it will be embedded with a piece of code that ties to a contract promising the buyer one of Arakelian’s ovarian eggs.
Love, Hope, Live debuted at Art Basel in Miami earlier this month. Arakelian is still deciding which company to use to mint the NFT, according to a spokesperson, and the date for auctioning it has not been announced yet.
“Art is always perception. If people see this as a performance, then it is. However my choice was not based on whether it was a performance but more about it being the biggest gift I can give with my art,” Arakelian told Fortune.
“The egg will hopefully become a child and then it will be a child, not art. However I hope the child and its parents will always feel a special connection to my art and the NFT,” she said.
How exactly will this egg transaction work?
“The NFT will include a contract that gives the buyer ownership [of the egg]. Then when they want to collect, I will have a procedure and they will be given the egg,” Arakelian told Fortune. She added that the procedure will be “fully supervised by doctors and experts.”
Arakelian said the decision to sell her egg took more than a year, and added that she hopes it will help a couple who are struggling to have a child.
It’s anyone’s guess how much the NFT will sell for.
“The NFT market is so explosive it could be any amount,” Arakelian’s publicist, Jane Owen, told Fortune.
The market for art sold as an NFT skyrocketed by over 800% by April of this year, Business Insider reported, rising to $490 million. In perhaps the most groundbreaking NFT art purchase this year, the creators of DreamVerse, MetaKovan and Twobadour, bought an NFT from artist Beeple for $69 million in March. Some digital art watchers are concerned the excitement over NFTs is just a bubble, while others, like MetaKovan and Twobadour, predict it will permanently alter how the art community assigns value.
In another boundary-breaking debut at Art Basel this year, a piece of art titled El Primero involved planting the signature of Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry into the DNA of a live bacteria.
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