Meme-Artwork Turns Into NFT Masterpiece After Being Shared By Elon Musk
Image via Phil Stafford / Shutterstock.com
When self-proclaimed “hobby artist” Eva Beylin posted a meme-artwork titled Love in the Time of Web3 on Twitter last week, she didn’t know that it would later sell for more than US$20,000 thanks to a certain Elon Musk.
The art piece Love in the Time of Web3 depicts a young couple relaxing and admiring a “work of art” on the wall, which comes in the form of Bitcoin and Ethereum prices being edited to show $69,000 and $4,200 respectively, a humorous attribution to meme culture.
Of course, the price for Bitcoin hasn’t quite reached that figure yet, although the one for Ethereum is closer to reality.
Love in the Time of Web3 pic.twitter.com/S4u7rtpGQK
— Eva Beylin (@evabeylin) October 21, 2021
Musk loves a good meme—don’t we all—and this isn’t much of a secret; he often reposts them on his Twitter page. Unfortunately, these reposts tend to lack proper credit to the artists or original posters. On the same day Beylin sent her tweet, Musk reposted the meme.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) October 21, 2021
“I am over the moon,” Beylin, who is a fan of Musk’s, says to CNBC Make It. Despite Musk not crediting her, she doesn’t mind—she describes the incident as “surreal.”
At time of writing, Musk’s tweet has garnered 719,500 likes. With the amount of attention rapidly building, Beylin decided to, in very crypto-suitable fashion, list it as an NFT on the marketplace Zora. In two days, it sold for five wrapped ether, which is currently valued at US$20,596.09.
This cartoon couple is often circulated as a template with different images or text edited onto the frame where the prices are shown, and wasn’t drawn by Beylin. The edit of the prices came from Twitter user shegenerates, who had tweeted it also as a joke. Beylin compensated her with 20% of the proceeds from the NFT sale, but she was alright with the edit being used anyway.
“Personally, I have [Musk] blocked on Twitter, so I only saw it after Eva posted about him sharing it,” shegenerates explains. “I wish I got all those likes myself because I can only imagine how much serotonin my brain would make with all that attention, but memes are permissionless, so it’s just cool to see things I shared around.”
Beylin states that with the remainder of her profit from the sales, she wants to reinvest in other artists’ NFTs as a way of giving back to the community her own art belongs to. She cites the tokens as what made monetizing her art possible, and says that reinvesting back into them has always been her “thing.”
[via CNBC Make It, image via Phil Stafford / Shutterstock.com]
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