1. Edward Snowden NFT Sells for $5.4 Million in Ethereum

An NFT artwork created by Edward Snowden has sold for $5.4 million in Ethereum.

“Stay Free” portrays the NSA whistleblower and exiled American with hand on chin like a modern Rodin statue. (Photographer Platon snapped the pic.)

This unique, signed work combines the entirety of a landmark court decision ruling the National Security Agency’s mass surveillance violated the law, with the iconic portrait of the whistleblower by Platon (used with permission). It is the only known NFT produced by Snowden using open source software.

2. Luxury auction house Sotheby’s has auctioned off a non-fungible token (NFT) collection by Pak for nearly $17 million

The NFT, titled “The Fungible,” was created by Pak, an anonymous digital artist, and was auctioned in a two-day sale on NFT marketplace Nifty Gateway. In the two days, the sale garnered a total of $16,825,999.

The collection included NFTs in the form of digital “cubes.” The individual NFTs were: A Cube (1), Five Cubes (5), Ten Cubes (10), Twenty Cubes (20), Fifty Cubes (50), Hundred Cubes (100), Five Hundred Cubes (500), and Thousand Cubes (1,000).

500 cubes from Pak’s Fungible collection Courtesy of Sotheby’s and Pak

3. Kate Moss Is Getting Into NFTs

The supermodel is tapping into the growing demand for non-fungible digital art by offering three, single-edition, short videos for sale by auction next week, with part of their proceeds benefitting Adwoa Aboah’s Gurls Talk mental health foundation. Moss partnered with an anonymous artist group Moments in Time Collective to produce the pieces, according to Vogue, which were shot in her home with the model wearing her own clothes.

4. Sotheby’s Online Sale Next Month will be Dedicated to Works by Women Artists

Sotheby’s will hold an online-only auction in May dedicated to female artists who have been marginalized by history due to their gender.

Dubbed “(Women) Artists,” the sale will feature works by female artists from the 17th through 21st centuries, exploring their historical contributions to the art world as well as their personal stories.

“The Flower (The Gift)” by Laura Knight
ETX Studio, Courtesy of Sotheby’s

5. Science Museum defends relationship with Shell

The Science Museum Group has defended the decision to make Shell a “major sponsor” of its forthcoming exhibition Our Future Planet, its flagship climate exhibition, which opens in London next month (19 May). The museum faced a wave of criticism from scientists and environmentalists when the sponsorship deal with the Anglo-Dutch oil group was announced last week. Naomi Oreskes, a professor of the history of science at Harvard University, wrote on Twitter that she is “stunned and sad that they [Science Museum Group] are helping Shell to greenwash its image”.

For more weekly news, come back next week!

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