"Love Is the Air" Splits For 10,000 NFTs

“I always wanted to own a work of art, even when I had  no money. I wanted to have  a minimal stake in the paintings  I liked.” Loïc Gouzer, Christie’s head of contemporary art  and co-founder of  a new company called NFT, wants to share ownership by transforming traditional works of art into NFT  sets  called Particles,  allowing  potentially thousands of people to share ownership of specific works. He said he was the co-founder of the company Particle. Work. After receiving $15 million in seed funding from a venture capital firm and announcing its existence as a company last summer, that wish has become a reality. 

Particle announced Wednesday that its first acquisition was Banksy's Love Is in the Air (2005), which was acquired by the Particle team at auction for $12.9 million. The artwork was split into 10,000 NFTs, each representing a unique piece of the painting. The original Love Is in the Air offer runs from January 10th to January 14th, and  collectors can purchase pieces of the artwork for around $1,500. After the initial proposal, the particles will enter the secondary market via the NFT platform, and it is unknown how the price will change.

The actual version of Love Is in the Air is donated to the Particle Foundation, the company's non-profit division, which maintains, preserves, and inspects works of art that collectors  can rightfully claim to be in their possession. The royalty earned from the resale of particles (as with all NFTs, particles are tied to a smart contract that ensures that a portion of the resale value is returned to the NFT creator) is used in part to fund the Particle Foundation. And the Foundation also keeps 1% of the love particles in the air "like a protective piece and to make sure no one can assume that they can claim the actual painting," as the press release explains. 

Attempting to sell a physical work would be extremely difficult given the complexity inherent in the fact that the value of each particle fluctuates across a wide and changing collector base. In comparison, for a company like Rally that shares ownership of collectibles in a more traditional way, selling the  entire item or work is the only way for collectors to see a return on their investment. Currently, approximately 5,500 co-owners of copies of the Declaration of Independence are voting  to sell the historical document. If they decide to sell together as a group, they all get a return on their investment  and  more. For the Particle, the ROI potential  is not a collective decision, but an immediate and individual one that needs to be done on a secondary NFT platform. The downside of this is that all investors are responsible for marketing and selling their assets in highly volatile NFT markets. 

Particle and the Particle Foundation together have announced their ambition to create a meta-museum of sorts that combines the management of traditional institutions with the exclusivity of  private collections. transaction. A company's vision is largely dependent on its own ability to solve the problems of this complex matrix. The challenge is worth experiencing the sense that more people own a great work of art. “The Particle Foundation will not only be a museum for  people, it will be a museum for themselves,” he said. “It would be nice to see art this way, because the pure pleasure of art is not complete until you feel that you own it.”