Canadian filmmaker David Cronenberg, who will present a film at the Cannes Film Festival in which the vital organs are at the forefront, led by example by auctioning an NFT of a photo of his kidney stones.
The name NFT is the acronym for the English “Non-Fungible Token”, or “non-fungible token” in French. More concretely, it is an unfalsifiable digital certificate of authenticity testifying to the ownership of a real or virtual object.
David Cronenberg’s token, named Inner Beauty (Inner beauty), has been on sale on the Superrare crypto-art platform for a little over three weeks, with a “reserve price” of ten ethereum (about 30,000 US dollars depending on the price of this cryptocurrency).
Once this amount is reached, the auction will last 24 hours.
“My doctor said to me, ‘I’d like to keep your kidney stones for analysis,'” explained David Cronenberg to his fans on the exchange site. The 79-year-old director says he refused, finding them “too beautiful to be destroyed”.
David Cronenberg then decides to photograph the 18 clots expelled from his body and made an NFT of them. If only the buyer of the NFT is considered as the holder of the work, it remains accessible to everyone on the Internet.
The filmmaker is not at his first attempt: he sold last year (for 25 ethereums) a short film in which he appears alongside a very convincing reproduction of his corpse.
Inspired by his own film
The idea ofInner Beauty comes from his movie Dead Ringers (1988), devoted to twin gynecologists who share everything, including women.
“At one point, one of the twins said to the other, ‘I don’t understand why there aren’t beauty contests dedicated to the inside of bodies,'” Cronenberg recalled.
This is also a reference to his new film, Crimes of the Future (The crimes of the future), with Viggo Mortensen, in the running for the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival (May 17 to 28). The actor will undergo “live surgery on his own body”, reveals the filmmaker.
David Cronenberg is not the only director to invest the world of NFT. American David Lynch launched a series of tokens with rock band Interpol last October.
In Hollywood, NFT sales have even become a source of funding for independent films.
Cronenberg did not indicate if a physical version ofInner Beauty would accompany the NFT, most of which remain digital creations. “But normally, that’s the custom,” said a representative of the Superrare cryptoart platform, interviewed by AFP.