Ja Rule is keeping his name in the headlines again thanks to the NFT craze. We'd think that by now the rapper would be done beating the dead horse that is Fyre Festival, but alas he turned the dying hype into one last trick: a painting that he just sold for $122,000 as an NFT.
The original painting created by Tripp Derrick Barnes and previously owned by Ja Rule sold at auction yesterday through the rapper’s NFT venture Flipkick, which lets up-and-coming artists and holders of valuable art monetize their work with non-fungible tokens.
The 48-inch-by-60-inch, oil-paint portrait of the misbegotten fest’s corporate logo has hung in the rapper's New Jersey mansion since the company’s Manhattan headquarters closed several years ago. “I just wanted that energy out,” Ja Rule said of the picture.
The Fyre Festival portrait was originally set at a reserve price of $600,000, meaning, it wasn't intended to trade hands for anything less than that. But it seems Ja Rule was eager to get rid of the painting and its bad juju even if it's just for a fraction of the price – among the item notes for this auction lot, Rule wrote: “F—k this painting.”
While this auction might not have gone as planned – but really which Ja Rule event does? – we expect this won't be the last NFT flip we'll see from him. With his new enterprise, Flipkick, he plans on selling more part digital, part physical objects as NFTs, even if, like us, he has no idea what that means. “I heard about NFTs [first] maybe like, a couple of weeks ago,” admits Ja Rule. “I wasn't too educated on them, and I’m still learning a lot about it... I think people got a little bit tired of the regular stocks-and-bonds way of investing.”
