Artist blows up Lamborghini in protest against crypto culture
Artist Shl0ms blew up a $250,000 Lamborghini Huracan to protest the culture of easy money in the crypto world. The artist wants to use the rubble to create 999 NFTs, which are scheduled to be auctioned on February 25.
The craze for blockchain-based non-fungible tokens (NFTs) has spread like wildfire over the last year. NFTs have been sold in the market for millions of dollars and investors have jumped in to make a quick buck. But can you imagine someone burning a Lamborghini in in protest?
Artist Shl0ms recently blew up a $250,000 Lamborghini Huracan to protest the culture of easy bucks in the crypto economy. In a unique form of protest, the artist himself will transform the wreckage of the Lamborghini into a collection of 999 NFTs. Speaking to crypto news publication The Block, the artist says:
“This technology is incredibly promising, there are so many good things that we could do with it, but there are also so many terrible things that are being done with it. They are truly extractive zero-sum practices.”
Glad that’s clear now. The artist also explains why he chose the Lamborghini: “The Lambo is a pretty strong representation of people who are only into crypto because it’s a way for them to get at other people’s money as quickly as possible. “
Allegedly, the artist Shl0ms does not have a traditional crypto background. However, he has been familiar with the crypto space since 2016. Shl0ms goes on to explain the phenomenon of skeuomorphism, saying the digital world was designed by dragging a physical file through space to make it appear like the real world. The artist has also played with this idea in his earlier works.
Lamborghini debris as NFTs
Shl0ms said that blowing up a real Lambo and converting its fragments into NFTs represents the interface between the physical and the digital: “The motif of destruction as creation is quite common in the traditional art world. It’s not that common in the world of crypto art.”
Shl0ms first tweeted the idea of blowing up a Lamborghini in September 2021. He spoke of “physically fractionating” the luxury car and creating NFTs from the fragments. Ritholtz Wealth Management COO Nick Maggiulli asked the artist the car would be “chaotically destroyed or methodically dismantled.”
Shl0ms later ran a poll on Twitter, where his followers chose “chaos” over “order.” In his Twitter post at the time , Shl0ms wrote :
“Also, I want to make it clear that I hate Lambos and that’s why I want to destroy one. In fact, the DAO will only allow people who hate Lambos, that will be our balancing ethos.”
Hatred as an ethos, then. In order to push this not entirely new idea forward, Shl0ms received the financial support of a company – surely it couldn’t have been Ferrari? — and used his own funds from previous sales of his art. After the Lamborghini exploded, the artist’s team collected and documented the fragments. This included a wrap around video of each piece of debris in 4K.
The collection will be auctioned on February 25, with the team also planning to release full video of the explosion. Of the 999 NFTs, 888 are offered for sale and the remaining 111 are available for the team and initial investors. So we can be curious to see how much quick money the artist makes with his protest against quick money in the crypto world …
