Canadian director David Cronenberg, whose Cannes Film Festival is showing a movie about vital organs as artwork, has decided to set an example by selling an NFT-style photo of his kidney stones.
Cronenberg put the image called “Inner Beauty” for sale on the “Super Rare” platform about three weeks ago, with a “reserve price” of ten Ethereum (about $30,000 according to the exchange rate of this cryptocurrency).
Once this amount is reached, the auction will continue for 24 hours, AFP reported.
“My doctor told me that he should keep the kidney stones for analysis,” Cronenberg said on the trading site, but the 79-year-old director refuses because he finds these stones “too beautiful to disintegrate.”
Cronenberg decided to photograph 18 stones removed from his body and convert these images into NFT products.
While only the buyer of the NFT product has the work, the product remains available to everyone online.
Cronenberg did not clarify whether a physical copy of “Inner Beauty” would accompany the image presented in the form of “NFT”, as these products often remain in digital form only.
Last year, the director sold (for 25 etheromas) a short film in which he appeared alongside a corpse that looked exactly like him.
The idea for “Inner Beauty” came from the Cronenberg movie “Dead Rangers” (1988), about two twin gynecologists who share everything.
In one scene of the film, Cronenberg says, as he asks the doctor of his twins, “Why not organize beauty contests dedicated to the inside of the body?”
The release of the image of “Inner Beauty” also bears a reference to Cronenberg’s new film “Crimes of the Future”, which is nominated for the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival, in which one of the roles is played by Viggo Mortensen.
NFTs (non-fungible tokens) are digital products with a certificate of authenticity built using Blockchain technology, and their Hollywood revenue has become a source of funding for independent films.