Adding to the idea that almost everything under the sun can now be sold as an NFT, a 42-year-old Armenian multimedia artist from Los Angeles, California, Narine Arakelian, is selling her ovarian egg as NFT or non-fungible token at Art Basel Miami Beach.
She created a three-part series painting called “Love, Hope, Live”, but the “Live” section is the only one that contains the contract for one of her eggs to be sold as an NFT.
This painting will be auctioned off as a physical creation. The buyer of the NFT will find an embedded piece of code that will link it to a contract that promises one of her eggs. The buyer will purchase this NFT using cryptocurrency by unlocking it with a unique blockchain code.
Currently, the piece is still for sale as an NFT. As for the price, Jane Owen, Arakelian’s publicist, told Fortune, “The NFT market is so explosive it could be any amount.”
It is stated in the contract that the buyer will get one of her ovarian eggs and she expects the buyer to conceive a child with it, she told Page Six.
According to Page Six, the artist has a 21-year -old son of her own and she told them that she is excited to “bring a child into the world through her work, and hopes to sell it to a couple who is struggling with fertility.”
She hopes to help out a couple that had trouble in conceiving a child and that couple would give birth to a child with her egg.
“I am so happy to bring a child into the world through my artwork. It’s a beautiful act of creativity to give the gift of art and life,” she told Page Six. “My artworks are all my children and the fact this one will actually produce a child is wonderful. ‘The art will always mean so much to the buyer because it brought them their child. It will always carry that special memory.”
Once the buyer is ready, she will undergo “a procedure fully supervised by doctors and experts” to retrieve her egg. However, there is no statement from her that she would be willing to undergo multiple rounds of egg retrieval in case the first one is unsuccessful.
The artist also didn’t mention how involved she would be with a child who will be conceived through her art.
She said that she spent more than a year deciding whether or not it was the right thing to do. In response to potential criticism that she’s doing this performance to grab attention, she told Fortune, “Art is always perception. If people see this as a performance, then it is. However, my choice was not based on whether it was a performance but more about it being the biggest gift I can give with my art.”
She also added, “The egg will hopefully become a child and then it will be a child, not art. However, I hope the child and its parents will always feel a special connection to my art and the NFT.”
In the exhibition at Art Basel in Miami, her piece is not the only NFT on display. The Versace dress of Tina Turner and the prison badge of Michael Cohen, lawyer of Donald Trump are also on display.
