‘Inspiring Story Of An Artist Who Borrowed Money For A Project To Making $4m In A Day’: How NFTs Are Shaking Up The Art World

Digital art is a billion-dollar business, with everyone from Paris Hilton to Damien Hirst trading in ‘non-fungible tokens’. But are NFTs just a get-rich-quick scheme masquerading as culture? “It’s actually a lot simpler than you think.” It’s a Tuesday afternoon, and somewhat to my surprise, I’m on the phone to Paris Hilton, who is graciously explaining the world of NFTs.

Hilton is many things – a reality star, an heiress, an unlikely lockdown fitness guru who uses designer handbags instead of weights. But until now, she has never been considered a significant player in the art world. When artists have acknowledged her, often they’ve done so to fetish her image. In 2008, Damien Hirst bought a portrait of her by the artist Jonathan Yeo, in which her body is constructed from collaged images cut from porn magazines.

Yet in the past year she’s become a surreal figurehead in the NFT scene: a world flush with crypto dollars and high on a promise to transform the worlds of art and commerce. When we speak, Hilton has just returned from a bitcoin conference in Miami, where customers paid up to $25,000 for VIP tables at the opening party to watch her DJ in a pair of diamanté-encrusted headphones. “NFT stands for non-fungible token, a digital token that is redeemable for a digital piece of art,” she explains. “You can have it on your computer server or your phone. I have these screens in my house where I display them.”

Sure enough, at Hilton’s Beverly Hills mansion there are screens displaying NFTs she made in collaboration with the digital artist Blake Kathryn. These include a video of a chihuahua on top of a rotating ionic column (a tribute to her deceased pet Tinkerbell) and an animated self-portrait of Hilton as a sparkling CGI Barbie floating in the clouds, a piece she’s called Iconic Crypto Queen, and which she sold in April for more than $1m. 

Hilton first started investing in cryptocurrency in 2016. “I became friends with the founders of Ethereum,” she says. (Ethereum produces ether, the currency in which the majority of NFTs are traded.) Since then she’s thrown herself into collecting crypto art, and owns more than 150 NFTs.

To advocates of the NFT, the technology offers a revolutionary new way of selling art, and of circumventing snooty cultural gatekeepers whose resistance to a crypto future seems as square as the 19th-century Parisian art world’s disdain for impressionism. In this context, the relevance of Hilton’s brand to the NFT movement makes sense. Pink, jewel-encrusted, and openly motivated by being as rich and famous as humanly possible, she’s a far cry from the type of person whose work is typically exhibited in blue-chip galleries or hung in booths at art fairs.

Yet Hilton’s endorsement may also be ammunition for those who view the NFT as just another depressing example of the speculative logic of finance monopolising taste. To detractors, from critic Waldemar Januszczak to artist David Hockney, the NFT marketplace is a home for morally bankrupt, environmentally vandalistic money-grabbers whose creations barely qualify as art.

While most of us are still trying to remember what “fungible” means, a battle is under way to define how NFTs are understood. Are they a vital cultural product that tells us something profound about digital consumerism? Or are they just the latest cynical way to make absurd amounts of money?

In the beginning, before the circus pitched up, there were nerds. Inevitably, because this is the internet, there were also cats. Crypto Kitties, to be precise, is an online game launched in 2017, enabling players to trade and “breed” unique cartoon felines, sold as NFTs, using blockchain technology. Although the first NFT was created by a man named Kevin McCoy in 2014, Crypto Kitties attracted attention and money, with some cats trading for hundreds of thousands of dollars. During 2020, as cryptocurrencies boomed and the pandemic accelerated our transformation into a species of screen-obsessed zombies, interest in NFTs rapidly picked up pace. As a consequence, the value of work by a relatively small number of artists already on the scene rocketed.

Among them was Trevor Jones, a 51-year-old painter who lives in Edinburgh. You’ve probably never heard of Jones, but he’s the most successful NFT artist working in the UK. He started making NFTs in 2019. “Five years ago, I was struggling to pay the mortgage,” he tells me. “I went from having to borrow money from friends to pay the bills to making $4m in a day.”

Jones has made a name for himself combining painting with digital technology, often producing pastiches of famous artworks with a crypto twist. In 2020, Bitcoin Bull – an animated painting of a Picasso-inspired bull, decorated with bitcoin logos and Twitter birds – was bought by a prominent crypto collector named Pablo Rodriguez-Fraile for $55,555.55.

Jones is warm, unguarded, and stunned by his rapid ascent. “I grew up in a little logging community,” he says of his childhood in western Canada, a place he describes as “rough”. “When I was 25, a friend of mine ended up getting into a fight at a bar and was killed.” He left soon after, eventually settling in Edinburgh, where he worked at the city’s Hard Rock Cafe as a waiter and later as a manager.

Jones tells me about the mental health crisis he suffered in his early 30s. “My girlfriend and I broke up and it kind of all came crashing down. At that point, it sounds cliched, but I decided I needed to find something to save me.”

He set his heart on becoming an artist and “begged” his way on to an art foundation course at Leith School of Art, which he followed with a degree at the University of Edinburgh.

Things began to look up for Jones in 2012, when he had the idea of incorporating QR codes into his art, painting the scannable barcodes in Mondrian-like colours on canvas. Scanning the paintings takes viewers through to an online gallery, where anybody can upload their work. “People were laughing at me at the time,” he says. While gallery audiences turned their noses up, he gained a new following online, one that would turn out to have deep pockets.

In 2019, Jones began working with animators to turn his paintings into short videos that he sold as NFTs. Among his most successful works is Bitcoin Angel, an NFT based on Bernini’s baroque masterpiece The Ecstasy of Saint Teresa, which he sold in 2020 for the equivalent of more than $3m (all of Jones’s NFTs are bought using cryptocurrency). In Bernini’s marble sculpture, a nun has been stabbed in the heart by an angel with a spear. She leans backwards, overcome by the sublime ecstasy of being penetrated by a heavenly body. When the arrow pierces the heart of Jones’s nun, she bleeds bitcoin.

“I look at my life as pre-Beeple and post-Beeple,” he adds. “The same way the world thinks about before Jesus Christ and after. Beeple is kind of my Jesus.”

In the months since, Christie’s has continued to cash in on NFTs. In May, it achieved $16.9m for nine pixelated cartoon characters from the Crypto Punks series, early examples of NFT art that have become sought-after collectibles. Christie’s has also attempted to unite the crypto and modern art markets. This spring, it hosted a sale of digital artworks made by Andy Warhol in the 1980s. The images, which had been recovered from floppy disks and transformed into NFTs, include drawings, made on the artist’s Commodore Amiga computer, of bananas, flowers, and of a Campbell’s soup can that alone sold for more than $1m.

In general, the commercial gallery world has been understandably cagey about adopting technology designed to circumvent it. Behind the scenes, however, a number of galleries have attempted to woo Jones. He has declined their advances. “What can a commercial gallery do for me?” he asks. “Having a gallery exhibition before, I worked a year creating paintings, I paid for all the framing, the overheads for the studio. I had the paintings delivered to the commercial gallery. I may or may not sell, the gallery takes 45 to 55% commission, and they might pay out a month, six weeks, two months later.” And now? “I sell something and three minutes later I’ve got the money in my digital wallet.”