By Jason Nelson
2 min read
As most people will tell you, they just buy Playboy for the articles. Maybe they should start looking at the pictures.
The lifestyle brand behind the iconic magazine has partnered with SuperRare to release its first NFT collection with the platform—Playboy's third in total—to be featured at Decentraland Art Week tomorrow, July 10.
The exhibition, titled the Miami Beach Art Collection, features art by Ayla El-Moussa, REK0DE, Jon Noorlander, MBSJQ, as well as an original photograph of a 1970 Playboy Bunny on water skis. Because, well, Miami.
Image: Playboy
“Playboy has always taken risks when it comes to exploring new art forms, and digital art is a natural next step of that evolution!” Liz Suman, VP of Art Curation and Editorial at Playboy, told Decrypt.
She added: “I asked the artists to explore three powerful themes relevant to Playboy’s past, present, and future: a uniquely Miami aesthetic, the ever-evolving cryptocurrency landscape that Playboy is deeply embedded in, and Playboy’s iconic logo.”
Founded in December 1953 by Hugh Hefner before televisions—let alone computers and mobile phones—were everyday household items, Playboy has leveraged new art forms and technologies as they've arisen. It's also proven willing to stoke controversy and spur conversation. Getting into the NFT space—which registered $2.5 billion in sales for the first half of 2021—makes perfect sense.
Suman said, “Our goal is to build on our 67-year-old history of championing artists and participating in collaborations that ignite meaningful conversations about censorship, sexuality, freedom of expression.”
NFTs, or non-fungible tokens, are digital deeds that live on a blockchain and represent ownership in a virtual or physical good. To preserve authenticity, Playboy says each artist will mint their respective NFT themselves via the Ethereum blockchain and then transfer the NFT to Playboy to sell.
SuperRare, founded in 2017, is a blockchain-based digital art market, a place for creators and collectors to engage. Though the art will be hosted on SuperRare's platform, it's being promoted in collaboration with Decentraland, a virtual reality platform powered by the Ethereum blockchain. Within the Decentraland world, users can create, experience, and monetize what they build and own. Suman said that Playboy "worked closely" with the Decentraland team on the launch.
Decentraland Art Week runs July 8 to 18. The Miami Beach Art Collection went on auction today.
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