Are NFTs memes – or masterpieces?

You may think you have experienced buyer’s remorse. But until you’ve splashed out £4,000 on a Jpeg, you have not. That’s where I found myself the other day, after an adrenalin-fuelled afternoon bidding on a digital collectible ‘card’ depicting the Mona Lisa sitting on an easel.

The item in question is a Curio Card, one of the earliest examples of a non-fungible token (NFT), a new technology used to buy and sell digital art. NFTs are the latest frontier for crypto-currency maniacs, the online gold rushers who keep financial watchdogs awake at night. Bored by a quiet summer for stock markets, memes and bitcoin speculation, the maniacs are piling into the fledgling digital-art market.

It is booming. In August, punters spent a total of $2 billion on NFTs. Some of the sales are truly farcical, like the clip-art image of a rock which went for $1.3 million. Last week a woman called Natasha Che bought a diamond for $5,000, destroyed it, then flogged a photo of it for $18,000. There’s been a slight lull in NFT mania in recent days, as crypto-currencies dipped. But the overall trend is up and up.

If you’re still wondering what the hell I’m talking about, let me try to explain. An NFT is an ownership record of something unique, like a digital painting. If you buy it, you are the sole owner of the artwork. Of course, on the internet, you can just right click and save the file. But you would own a reproduction, not the original. To put it in terms of physical art collecting: anyone can have a Van Gogh print; only one person can own the original.

Not that we’re talking Van Gogh here. Most NFT art looks like something a 14-year-old would draw on their pencil case while high on Monster energy drinks.