NFTs, or Non-Fungible Tokens, are undeniably the hottest thing on the internet right now. And when there’s money to be made, everyone naturally wants a piece of the pie – even carmakers are joining in the fanfare, including Volkswagen Malaysia and Lamborghini themselves.
With the virtually unending ocean of NFTs out there, you’ve got to do something pretty special to catch the attention of the rich art-loving techbros. For conceptual artist Shl0ms, that apparently meant blowing up a perfectly good Lamborghini Huracan into shreds, and then selling the fragments as art.
According to Fortune, the whole process took a team of about 100 people to carry out – from transporting the car to an empty desert, rigging the explosives, to on-site camera work – all for the sweet, sweet taste of digital money.
The artist did not disclose the type nor amount of explosives used, but the team clarified to Motor1 that an engineering and explosives team was on site to dial everything in to make sure the Lambo shreds were “aesthetically pleasing”.
RELATED: Lamborghini’s ‘Space Key’ is a piece of carbon fibre that unlocks an NFT art piece
After the explosion, the scattered remains were then collected by the team and filmed individually – it’s these videos that will be eventually sold on the blockchain.
In total, Shl0m created 999 individual NFT “artworks” from the explosion as part of the $Car project, ranging from stray camshafts to charred seats. Among those, 888 will be auctioned off as NFTs starting from 0.01 Ether (approx. RM100), while the remaining 111 will be given to the artist’s team and used for an upcoming project.
The full video of the Lamborghini Huracan’s demise will be released when the auction goes live tomorrow. But until then, there’s a teaser of the whole stunt on the artist’s Twitter page.
Now, we can’t say that we understand art, but to us the whole stunt just feels incredibly wasteful, especially when the perfectly functional Lamborghini Huracan itself – even if used – would’ve already cost them anywhere between USD200,000 to USD300,000 (approx. RM837k to RM1.3 million).
According to the Fortune report, Shl0ms said that the $Car project was created to protest the “greed” surrounding cryptocurrency and NFTs. We imagine that the only reason they actually went ahead with the project is because they felt that they’d make more money than what they would spend on the car itself – which, I dunno, sounds quite a bit like “greed”.
[H/T: Motor1]
