Grimes has made a name for herself with her experimental music but now, she’s leaning into the experimental art world — and making a big profit. On Sunday, the singer released her first collection of digital artwork in collaboration with her brother Mac Boucher. Upon releasing the collection, the duo raked in an impressive $6 million in under half an hour.
Grimes’ WarNymph Collection Vol 1 art collection was sold through auction. But it wasn’t a typical art auction, rather, it was all done through cryptocurrency. Each digital art piece was accompanied by exclusive audio and could only be purchased with non-fungible tokens (NFTs), a type of cryptographic token that cannot be exchanged.
NFT drop in 20 mins
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︎𝔊𝔯𝔦𝔪𝔢𝔰 (@Grimezsz) February 28, 2021
According to the collection’s description, Grimes’ WarNymph project was a commentary on identity in the digital age:
“The first of her kind, WarNymph is a digital entity spliced from a pixel DNA of the organic human, Grimes. Merging the raw images of a photogrammetry scan, enunciating her iconic tattoos, with a retopologized mesh that was sculpted, modelled, and morphed into a variety of forms before being permanently sealed into the body of a baby angel, a cherub. She exists in the liminal state of the virtual world, a Grimes narrative universe, within an alternate history of mythology and the infinite fragments of the future. She is a pioneer in the rapidly expanding metaverse.
Grimes, with the WarNymph project, explores the fluidity of identity in the virtual age: the ability to create, augment, and splinter ourselves into unlimited avatars, create boundless worlds, and build rich, complex lore.”
The collection went live on the NFT marketplace Nifty Gateway and sold out in just 20 minutes. Though Grimes made several million from the project, she’s not keeping it all to herself. According to Consequence of Sound, Grimes plans on donating a percentage of the collection’s proceeds to Carbon 180, an environmental NGO.
Check out Grimes’ WarNymph Collection Vol 1 here.