Ja Rule sells $122,000 Fyre Festival NFT artwork – with real painting thrown in
A digital ledger entry for a piece of art commemorating one of the most notorious acts of fraud in entertainment history has been sold online for six figures – and it comes with an actual painting.
The recording artist Ja Rule, whose name was prominently attached to the ill-fated Fyre Festival in 2017, sold a non-fungible token, or NFT, of a painting of the Fyre Festival logo for $122,000, he announced on Wednesday on Twitter.
The sale was the latest in an accelerating market for NFTs, unique electronic identifiers that can be associated with a physical or digital artwork, a concept – or, like the stage lineup at the Fyre Festival, nothing at all.
The purchaser of the Fyre Festival token will receive an original work of art commissioned at the time for the festival that has been hanging in Ja Rule’s New Jersey home. “I just wanted that energy out,” the artist told Forbes.
The work also comes with a note from Ja Rule reading “Fuck this painting.” But that’s not all Ja Rule is selling. He also is a part-owner of the online exchange, called Flipkick, where his painting was peddled and which is struggling for visibility in a hot emerging market.
“I heard about NFTs [first] maybe like, a couple of weeks ago,” Ja Rule told Forbes. “I wasn’t too educated on them, and I’m still learning a lot about it … I think people got a little bit tired of the regular stocks-and-bonds way of investing.”
Online NFT exchanges are also competing against traditional auction houses. An NFT by the artist Beeple sold for $69m at a Christie’s auction this month.
The Fyre Festival was marketed as a multi-day party featuring luxury accommodations and musical guests on a pristine Bahamas island. Its multitier marketing plan included paid posts by online influencers that made it sound like they were going. Guests paid thousands of dollars for tickets, but when they arrived at the would-be festival site only darkness and none of the promised luxury or entertainment was there.
The festival’s producer, Billy McFarland, was convicted of a $26m fraud in the affair and sentenced to six years in prison. Ja Rule was targeted by a class-action lawsuit but avoided sanction when it was determined that he did not know at the time that what he was selling did not exist as such.