If Grimes ever gets sick of making music, it seems she could always have an extremely lucrative career as an artist to fall back on.
On Sunday, the musician launched her collection of digital artwork titled “WarNymph,” created in collaboration with her brother Mac Boucher who she’s worked with on visual projects in the past. She put the pieces up for auction on the NFT trading platform Nifty Gateway, making them available to the public for purchase for the next 48 hours. Each of the works of art comes with a digital asset called an “NFT” or “non-fungible token,” a form of cryptocurrency that is unique and irreplicable, guaranteeing the authenticity and singularity of the art it’s meant to serve as a token for. After announcing the auction on Twitter, Grimes’s ten NFTs on offer—featuring dramatic, moody illustrations of winged babies wielding spears in outer space—sold for over $5.8 million in under 20 minutes, according to Business Insider.
The pieces are already attracting some steep resale price tags, as well, after one buyer quickly re-listed the “Newborn 2” NFT for $2.5 million. Some of the artwork also come with new, original music from Grimes, such as “Earth” which features the unreleased song “Ærythe,” the piece “Mars” that comes with the “Mars Theme,” and “Death of the Old” that’s accompanied by a demo of “Anhedonia.”
Grimes describes the baby that appears throughout her work as “the Goddess of Neo-Genesis,” who “battles the destructive force of obsolete ideas and systemic decay that threatens the future” while representing “a state of infinite infancy where she sheds her old skin of corruption.” However, many fans have speculated that the infant is actually a representation of her child with Elon Musk, X Æ A-12, as she also writes that WarNymph is “spliced from a pixel DNA of the organic human, Grimes.”
The singer plans to give a portion of the enormous proceeds from this auction to Carbon 180, a nonprofit focused on climate change and reducing carbon emissions. This is also just the first of many NFT collections Grimes has planned, explaining that WarNymph is just one fact of the mythical universe she’s created called Oth3rkin. And selling digital art of vengeful babies sure beats trying to sell off pieces of your soul.
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