Emily Ratajkowski to auction NFT in bid to reclaim her image
The model’s feud with artist Richard Prince reaches fever pitch as her take on his controversial portrait of her goes under the hammer this week
Cryptoart has been making headlines all year but if you think the bubble’s about to burst, think again. Last night at its inaugural 21st Century Evening Sale, Christie’s sold a single lot of nine CryptoPunk portraits – the original NFT created by Larva Labs way back in 2017 – for an eye-watering $16,962,500, double its estimate of $7-9m. This comes barely two months after the auction house’s sale of Beeple’s EVERYDAYS–THE FIRST 5000 DAYS, which achieved nearly $70m – a landmark feat for the NFT industry.
But what are NFTs and what has sparked the buying frenzy around them? Simply put, an NFT (non-fungible token) is a unique digital token stored on a digital ledger known as a blockchain, primarily the Ethereum network in the case of NFTs. Think of it as a certificate of authenticity for a digital asset – while photos, videos, audio and other types of digital files can be endlessly duplicated and shared, owning an NFT essentially means owning the one-of-a-kind original.
9 Cryptopunks: 2, 532, 58, 30, 635, 602, 768, 603 and 757, by Larva Labs, 2017. © Christie’s Images Limited 2021
NFTs are traded on sites such as OpenSea, Foundation, MakersPlace and SuperRare, which let collectors buy and sell art, typically using Ether, the cryptocurrency native to Ethereum. Nifty Gateway, another marketplace (and Grimes’ platform of choice), allows collectors to buy works the old-fashioned way – directly with a credit card. The NFT art market has grown more than 800% this year alone, with estimates of its value currently at around $490m.
There’s been heated discourse about the unprecedented boom in digital art, with much of the debate centred on the counter-intuitiveness that an infinitely replicable item can be worth millions. The most compelling case for the value of NFTs is that they are, at their core, cultural artefacts in the same way that a Rothko is: Twitter founder Jack Dorsey’s first-ever tweet went for $2.9m, while Zoë Roth, who you might know better as the cherubic-yet-devilish face of the 2005 Disaster Girl meme, sold the original image for $473,000 last month.
But the NFT marketplace is not all memes and CryptoKitties. The next major NFT to go up for auction is an unlikely one: a conceptual artwork by Emily Ratajkowski. In a bid to reclaim authority over her image, the American model is selling an NFT of herself posing in front of a controversial painting by appropriation artist Richard Prince in which she herself is the subject.
In a step toward my ongoing effort to reclaim and control my image, I’m thrilled to announce my first conceptual artwork to ever come to market, an NFT entitled Buying Myself Back: A Model for Redistribution.
— Emily Ratajkowski (@emrata) April 23, 2021
In a lengthy essay penned for The Cut last year, Ratajkowski blasted Prince for using her image without consent in his contentious New Portraits series, in which he reproduces Instagram posts mostly of young (and objectively attractive) women on enlarged canvases. Ratajkowski was dismayed to see her portrait hanging in a blue-chip gallery and even more distressed when she was unable to purchase the work in question.
She eventually acquired another Prince painting of herself in the series for $81,000 and it’s this work hung in her Los Angeles home that features in her freshly minted NFT. Ratajkowski has been a vocal critic of the balance of power – or lack thereof – between photographers and their subjects. She was previously sued by the photographer of a paparazzi picture that she posted to her own Instagram account, even though she had no say in the creation or distribution of the image.
Buying Myself Back: A Model for Redistribution, by Emily Ratajkowski, 2021. © Christie’s Images Limited 2021
Due to go under the hammer on 14 May, Buying Myself Back: A Model for Redistribution is a declaration of a new kind of power. ‘Using the newly introduced medium of NFTs,’ she tweeted, ‘I hope to symbolically set a precedent for women and ownership online, one that allows for women to have ongoing authority over their image and to receive rightful compensation for its usage and distribution.’
While bricks-and-mortar galleries scramble to keep pace, Christie’s has been quick to embrace the clearly lucrative medium of NFTs. Ratajkowski’s lot has been listed with no reserve price or estimate. She’ll also continue to receive a share of any future sales of the work, unlike traditional artworks. As last night’s CryptoPunks coup demonstrates: anything is possible in the crypto game. Watch this space.