Opensea, Where's My NFT

Further, it was sold along with the option for the winning bidder to destroy the original, making the NFT the only remaining edition of the art in existence.

The Art Newspaper had an excellent article prior to the auction taking place, before we knew just where things were headed!

“According to the auction sponsor Daystrom, the transaction, which will be stamped on the Ethereum blockchain, will “memorialize ownership” as well as “reproduction and IP rights that will be sold to the highest bidder in perpetuity”—though the consensus is that buying an NFT, much like a physical work of art, does not confer copyright. Licensing intellectual property rights is possible, though legally tricky. The potential destruction also raises issues about the artist's moral rights.”

Of course not everyone agrees with the nature of this NFT auction. It’s interesting, in a way I can see the NFT preserving the art in a way which might otherwise be impossible, or at least much more challenging. Destroying the physical original could certainly be considered insulting, foolish, or both. The notion of preserving ownership of this art by destroying half of the existing copies is completely counter-intuitive. It seems the act of destroying the original to ‘achieve’ would primarily serve as.

As if this alone wasn’t interesting enough, the late artist’s estate promptly had the NFT removed from Opensea, suggesting the seller own the license or rights to the art.

“David Stark, the licensing agent who deals with Basquiat’s archive, tells The Art Newspaper: “The estate of Jean-Michel Basquiat owns the copyright in the artwork referenced. No license or rights were conveyed to the seller and the NFT has subsequently been removed from sale.”

There seems to have been some confusion just who was in the right here...

There have been other Basquiat NFT collections delisted on OpenSea unexpectedly as well this week.

We’ll be sure to stay tuned. This particular project being removed appears to be isolated to OpenSea. Looks like the Daystrom Basquiat NFT might be proven to be a bit more authentic than some might have expected as well!