Free Airdrop of Molten Earth NFT
Creating value by giving art away
When my father, Leo Cappel passed away last year, I was wondering what I could do to keep his name alive and also to provide some income for my mother who is now 92, to allow her some comfort in her final years.
My father was an amazing artist, painter, and sculptor among his many talents. He is recognised around the world for everything from creating amazing museum displays at Canterbury Museum, and Auckland’s War Memorial and Museum, to his many other creations.
Leo and I argued for years, me saying that he was underpricing his art. The people who used to work with and share studios with him, added zeroes to their price tags, over and above what he put on his work.
The reason? He wanted anyone who liked it, to be able to afford his art. One of his paintings would go for a few thousand dollars, while his peers’ works were going for 6 figures. He wouldn’t budge on this. The highest amount one of his sculptures has sold for is a couple of tens of thousands of dollars. As an example, our mutual late friend, and past colleague of Leo’s, Tony Fomison had one of his works, Garden of Eden, auctioned for US$349,000 in 2020!
As a consequence, other than yachts, my parents never owned anything. When he passed away, Leo left my mother with enough to pay the bills and that was about all. He did leave some art and musical instruments, most of which already had names assigned in my parent’s will, going to children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren.
How could I create a passive income for my 92-year-old mother and be true to his socialist-leaning philosophy, which was borne from his experiences as a child in WWII when his family home and most of their possessions were confiscated by the Nazis.
This song, Buddy Can You Spare a Dime by Paul Stookey, was ironically one of their favourites from back in the day.
He built, he created, and he made people happy. Everyone was interested in him and his works, and rightfully so. He even kept donating to his favourite charities like Forest and Bird, and yet didn’t have enough money when he passed, to allow my mother to have the options little savings would provide, to take someone out to dinner, or buy a new musical organ after her instrument wore out.
NFTs and cryptocurrency were, like many things during COVID19 lockdowns, going up in value and I decided to embark on a project to create NFTs of a few of his sculptures, which would provide her with an income when they sold and a royalty when they resold.
Long story short, I invested 2-3 months in man hours, learning how to do it and eventually coming up with a concept. I would create 256 unique NFTs from his sculpture, Molten Earth. Crafted out mostly from zinc, it was a warning of the dire straights we humans are getting ourselves into with man-made climate change.
I discovered that the value of NFT art was pretty tenuous, and after learning about the concept of utility, I came up with the following combination. I created 256 unique GIFs and the second edition of Leo’s autobiography, Like a Guardian - Memoirs of a Survivor, with 255 numbered PDF copies including a foreword by my mother. The first 80 or so are on Rarible.
I started a community with a page and a group on Facebook. Most NFT communities use solutions like Discord for their communities, but I felt this was too complicated for his fans and friends, many of whom are technophobic baby boomers with little knowledge of the world of Non Fungible Tokens.
A few people commented that they would not like his NFTs traded in a platform that used a lot of electricity. I had to agree with them, so I started looking for a new location. I have now settled on Voice and am continuing the development of the 256 NFTs on that platform. So for now that is where the rest of them are going, although the Ethereum currency used on Rarible has just been transformed with the Ethereum Merge and now uses only 5% of the energy it did a week ago.
The other fatal flaw in wanting to give his contemporaries access to his art in the Web 2 environment is that cryptocurrency is gibberish to them and on top of the bad publicity it has had, in the changing world economy where values have gone down in the same way as company shares and real estate, there are fears about reducing values. I needed to have an environment where people could buy NFTs for cash. Voice allowed me to do that.
In my opinion, a lot of the drop in value has been due to people using software to generate collections of boring pixelated monkeys, with different hats on, or perhaps smoking a pipe, that holds no intrinsic value.
If you own a work of art or a book, you have parted with that cash, and the value now lies in owning the work of art and whatever utility resides with it. The ability to resell it is a bonus, but I haven’t heard of Leo’s works appearing on a secondary market. People bought them because they love them, and they hang or sit in homes, offices and galleries.
So now there are NFTs of Molten Earth on Rarible and Voice. They range in price from ‘make an offer’, US$10 to 1 ETH, the equivalent of US$1,430 at the time of writing.
Each NFT is a unique numbered GIF. There are only 256, a number I know Leo liked, and there will never be any more made. Each one comes with ownership of 1/256 of the actual sculpture. In addition, each one is bundled with a unique matching numbered PDF of the second edition of his autobiography, Like a Guardian - Memoirs of a (Holocaust) Survivor, which includes his war experience in the Nazi-occupied Netherlands of WWII, his time studying art and the famous Rietveld Academy in Amsterdam and the story of a Dutch immigrant family moving to New Zealand. It has a new foreword from Karen.
A chance to get one free.
Today, on 17 September 2022, I am giving away two of these NFTs, one to someone who responds to the offer on his Facebook Page, and one in his Facebook Group. This is an opportunity for two people to each get a bundle for free. Will that be you?