Ja Rule has sold an oil painting of Fyre Festival’s logo in NFT form for $122,000.
That sentence wouldn’t have made a lick of sense a couple months ago, but here’s what it means. In case the past year of mounting catastrophes clouded your memory, Fyre Festival was the extravagant music fest in the Bahamas that ended up being a comical failure full of fraud and deceit. The whole thing was orchestrated by Ja Rule and his business partner Billy McFarland, who’s currently serving a six-year prison sentence on multiple counts of fraud.
The 45-year-old rapper managed to get his name cleared from the massive lawsuit, and now he’s trying to get rid of the tangible reminders of the calamity that’s since been the subject of two documentaries and a tell-all podcast. One of those is a 48″ by 60″ oil painting of the festival’s logo that was hanging in the company’s New York office during the planning stages of the whole affair. Once shit hit the fan, it was ultimately moved to Ja Rule’s house in New Jersey, and on Wednesday he decided to auction it off so he never has to look at it again.
However, rather than selling the item in a traditional art auction, Rule was convinced to sell it in NFT (non-fungible token) form in order to capitalize on the new-fangled crypto-art craze. Therefore, the buyer who ended up shelling out $122,000 for this hideous artifact of music history will receive a one-of-a-kind digital version of the art in addition to the physical painting itself.
But that’s not all. The rapper told Forbes that he “just wanted that energy out” of his life, and the the painting will also come with a note from Ja Rule himself that poeticizes that sentiment: “Fuck this painting”, it reads. “When I first had it made, I was energized — I had embarked on a new business,” he told TMZ in a separate interview. “But then it became a symbol of what could have been. For me, it’s done and over with.”
The buyer is so far choosing to remain anonymous, but they bought it on Ja Rule’s new NFT exchange company KickFlip, which allows artists to sell their physical work in NFT form. It seems like a legitimate company, but Ja Rule also told Forbes that he only found out about NFT’s a couple weeks ago. “I wasn’t too educated on them, and I’m still learning a lot about it,” he said. “I think people got a little bit tired of the regular stocks-and-bonds way of investing.”
Say what you want about him, but the man sure does love to invest in suspiciously overvalued luxury business ventures. Hopefully this one doesn’t leave him with another regrettable oil painting.
Goodnight… pic.twitter.com/2xOXcjJ37L
— Ja Rule (@jarule) March 24, 2021