Butthole NFTs: Trippy Buttholes are a thing. Over the last two years, digital art in the form of non-fungible tokens (NFTs) has taken the world by storm. In May 2021, Mike Winkelmann — the digital artist known as Beeple — who once struggled to sell prints of his work for more than US$100, sold an NFT collage of his first 5000 artworks for a whopping US$69 million.
From there, the digital art craze truly kicked into gear, with a number of prominent NFT collections such as the Bored Ape Yacht Club, netting hundreds of millions of dollars in sales. The world of traditional art watched the rise of digital art open-mouthed. How were cartoon pictures of monkeys, and digitally generated art selling for such staggering sums?
While there are an overwhelming number of potential answers to this question — many of which will point to things like the mass adoption of digital technology forced upon us by Covid lockdowns — the overwhelming consensus is that there was a sudden shift in our collective understanding of and subsequently the value of art created through a digital medium.
Digital art, once viewed as merely a cheap imitation of “real” art and plagued by the problem best depicted through the ‘right-click-save‘ meme, was suddenly bolstered by a new method through which to verify its authenticity: the blockchain.
Butthole NFTs are coming
Now, NFTs have exploded in popularity, with a new generation of creatives constantly looking to new ways to push the boundaries in the online realm. In late-September last year, the luxury auction house Christie’s launched their first NFT-based digital gallery dubbed, Christies 3.0, to cater to the growing demand for digital ‘fine art’.
What is ‘art’ anyway?
Wherever fine art emerges, there tends to be an equal and opposite reaction on the other side of things, as provocateurs look to challenge haughty conceptions of what art really is. Consider for a moment the work of Tracey Emin and her deeply controversial ‘My Bed’ exhibition, first put on display in the UK’s prestigious Tate Gallery in 1999.
Emin’s work was the result of month-long bedridden bender that came in the wake of a bad break-up. When Emin finally made the decision to leave her sheets, she looked around at the mess of used tissues, bodily fluid-stained clothing, cigarettes, drained vodka bottles and condoms that surrounded her bed, and declared it to be a work of art.
Obviously this exhibition proved highly contentious, as the confessional, disgust-inducing nature of the work prodded sharply at many of society’s inclinations as to what defines art.
This is where Jason, the founder of an NFT project called ‘Trippy Buttholes’ comes in. With one foot in the digital art world and the other in the porn industry, Jason says his self-admittedly “open-minded” work is based largely on the notion of “bucking the system”.
“I’ve always loved irreverence in art and I like to push back on what’s called ‘classical art’ and have a bit of go at what constitutes that as well.”
Jason, Trippy Buttholes artist.
Butthole NFTs: NFT collection
In case you couldn’t work it out all on your own, the entire collection is based around layering psychedelic patterns on top of pictures of human buttholes, something that Jason says is an intentional striking out against the modern understanding of and conception of ‘art’.
“Everyone has their own ideas about art. You can draw a line on a page and 50 people love it and 50 people go ‘well that’s just a line on a page you dickhead’”
While he admits that the initial intent of the NFT collection was to shock the viewer with these close-up pictures of human buttholes — an idea which was actually formulated while sharing a few drinks with his wife — Jason tells me that his own understanding of the project has changed quickly once he began to zoom in a little.
“I got a couple of models, took some photos, and we ended up with some awesome images. And when you click on them and really expand them, especially out to full 4K, they just look like these big, beautiful pieces of art.”
Butthole NFTs: Sales
Due to the fact that the sales of his collection hasn’t been surging, with roughly nine sales (approximately AU$1000 worth) of his work so far, Jason has recently begun looking to different avenues to monetise the idea.
“This is when I thought of the girls doing OnlyFans. And I started thinking more about the idea of utility. You’re not just buying someone’s butthole, it goes beyond that. I thought, well, let’s get them to add a bundle or an additional collection gift, like gift packs that comes along with my NFT’s as a side-brand of the stuff they’re doing already.”
Jason has now partnered with three OnlyFans creators to launch a new, more personalised set of collections.
So, is Trippy Buttholes really a pushback against the reverence of art, or is it merely a series of human buttholes layered with psychedelic patterns that are then minted on the blockchain?
The beauty of art is that you, the observer, get to decide that all on your own.
