Playboy has announced a partnership with NFT art marketplace Nifty Gateway to auction and sell a variety of Playboy-themed artworks and photos. Some will come directly from the Playboy archive, while others are in partnership with existing digital art creators like Slime Sunday and Kathryn Blake. They announced the partnership this Tuesday on Twitter.
The nude magazine didn’t reveal a launch date yet. However, they mentioned that the collaboration with Slime Sunday will be ‘coming soon’, while the one with Kathryn Blake is scheduled for June. “We have much more in store as well, including curated NFT art collections from our nearly 70-year archive of art and photography”, the magazine wrote.
One thing Playboy seems to be doing well, is listen to the community. “A big piece of our work will be supporting artists as a collector and via upcoming grants. We’re here to learn, support the community and innovate together”, they wrote, before ending their tweet thread with a mandatory ‘shill me your artists’.
By the sounds of it, Playboy will be in this NFT space for the long run. Playboy already has a profile on Nifty Gateway. So far they have acquired three artworks: one Bull Run by Beeple, The Last Stand of the Nation State by Slime Sunday, and Zephone Brigita by Blake Kathryn.
What is crypto or NFT art?
Digital art has been around for decades. However, without the existence of blockchain technology it was impossible to verify authenticity and rarity. Now digital art is connected to a token on the blockchain, a non-fungible token or NFT. That way buyers can see how many copies of a certain artwork there are, and whether the product is original. Digital art on the blockchain used to be referred to as crypto art, but NFT art as a name has become increasingly popular.
The concept of seeing a digital image as art, is one thing. However, for many people it will be a challenge to consider digital images valuable. Consider this: The Mona Lisa is worth many millions of dollars. If I would paint the Mona Lisa in an exact copy, it would be worth only 50 dollars. Because we all know where the original version is. Being able to verify the authenticity and rarity of a piece of art is crucial. This applies to NFT art on the blockchain as well.
Some people don’t care about the Mona Lisa. It’s just a painting. They are happy to download an image from Google Images, print it on canvas and hang it in their living room. Others want the real deal. The same rules go up for digital art. Many people will be happy having a digital image they like, screenshotted on their phone. Others will value having an original artwork, minted by the actual creator, verifiable through blockchain technology.
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