NAPLES, Fla. — A Naples art gallery is breaking new ground.
Emillions Art is unveiling its first ever NFT, bringing classic art into the digital age.
NFT stands for ‘non-fungible token’ and they are unique pieces of digital content, meaning you can’t physically touch them. You can think of it like a digital trading card- a collectible digital token that holds value to the buyer. NFTs provide the owner absolute rights over that object and include a record showing who owns it, like the way a title shows ownership of a car.
Being a digital object, NFTs are bought and sold in online marketplaces and stored on the blockchain- a digital ledger used to record transactions. NFTs have grown in popularity over the last few months with some selling for millions. Now plenty of artists are getting in on the trend as a way to sell their artwork, both as a physical copy of their art along with the NFT version.
Emillions Art are the first art enthusiasts in Naples to take the crypto plunge.
The announcement came through a 32-second movie of contemporary digital artist Robin Austin’s larger-than-life photo mosaic portrait of a young Frank Sinatra in a 1938 police mug shot. The piece features more than 3,000 individual exploding images of little photo squares Austin assembled to make light, shadow, and color in the portrait. The unveiling marks the opening of the gallery's 'Is Art An Asset or An Investment?' exhibition now open in Emillions Art’s showroom on the second floor of the 837 building on 5th Avenue South.
It displays more than two dozen representations and original paintings and traces the evolution of art investment from the old masters- artists from the 1300s up to the 1800s- to the rebirth of classical culture in the early and high renaissance as well as modern masterworks.
The exhibition is open for public viewing through Saturday, October 30th from 10 a.m. until 5 p.m. You can find more information online right here.
