Digital art is nothing new to vonMash, who describes his blend of painting, video and sound as “afro-delic” – a psychedelic twist on Afrofuturism. But when the South African started thinking about selling his work as crypto-art on a blockchain, he hesitated. “I'm not fully for it because of the energy consumption that it takes,” he explained. Selling art as non-fungible tokens, or NFTs, uses the same technology as cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin. The buyer receives a verified digital token, which proves the artwork is an original. Visual artist vonMash poses for a portrait in his studio in Springs, South Africa. Photo: Luca Sola/AFP The boon for artists is that if their work goes up in value and is resold, they receive a portion of every future sale. “If another person buys my NFT, I automatically get a share of that,” vonMash said. With traditional art, if a buyer pays 100 dollars, and then “sells it for 100,000, I would not get a cent of that”. Warehouse of computers What worries vonMash and other artists is how those digital tokens get verified. Ownership of the artwork is authenticated through complex mathematical puzzles, so complex that the calculations require warehouses of...
