Why musician and Ethereum NFT artist Jimmy Edgar is skeptical of music NFTs

For musician and visual artist Jimmy Edgar, NFTs are intangible – but that’s not a bad thing.

IN music world, Edgar has worked with the likes of Vince Staples, Charli XCX, Miguel, Machinedrum and remixed Lady Gaga’s “Babylon”. But he has also branched out on his own with NFTs.

Edgar issues one Ethereum The NFT collection on August 11 called OXYGEN, which consists of 13 artworks that play with the viewer’s perception of the immaterial, liquid, air and consumer symbols of adulthood.

“Through a metaphysical process that Jimmy creates ‘digital condensation,’ imagination solidifies as literal objects,” a press release reads.

The NFTs will be displayed at the Vellum LA NFT Gallery in a solo exhibition in Los Angeles from August 11th to September 11th and will also be sold at the NFT Marketplace Foundation. Alice Scope and Sinziana Velicescu curated the exhibition.

NFTs– unique blockchain tokens signifying ownership – are connected to the digital art they authenticate. Edgar is comfortable with the abstract concepts of blockchain and digital tokens in part because the OXYGEN NFTs deal so directly with the idea of insignificance and the potential state changes of matter.

“I see Ethereum as a layer of the medium of art,” he shared Decrypt in an interview, adding that Ethereum NFTs essentially act as “a super-futuristic certificate of authenticity” for digital art.

Like the OXYGEN collection, Edgar’s previously released NFT collections OBJECTZ and OPTIONZ also includes 3D rendered images, surreal corporeality, sharp color gradients, and sometimes draws inspiration from artist Jeff Koons.

“There’s always a bit of humor in my art,” Edgar said of his work. “There’s always a bit of sarcasm.”

Edgar first got into NFTs in early 2021. His friends in the music industry had been excited about the potential of NFTs, and Edgar was quick with the idea, but wanted to apply it to visual art.

“My whole life pretty much exists in the digital realm,” he said, reflecting on why digital art is so important to him.

And immateriality—the idea that something can exist as a “non-object” without physicality—doesn’t devalue NFTs for Edgar. Instead, he sees it as part of the evolution of thought and visual art, and the immateriality of digital assets is a theme explored in his work.

“We’re kind of like this generation that’s moving into the intangible — we’re moving up the dimensions and becoming more intangible,” he said. “I have a lot of patience and conviction for cryptocurrency as a digital medium.”

When it comes to music, Edgar sees songs as invisible sculptures.

“I’ve always looked at music as sculpture in a way,” he shared. “Music is something insubstantial in the way that you don’t see it, you just feel it and hear it.”

While he sees huge potential for NFTs for visual art, Edgar doesn’t feel the same way about the current NFT applications for music – so don’t expect any songs from him to drop on the NFT music platform Royal or elsewhere anytime soon.

“I’ve seen, you know, a lot of talk and hype about music NFTs, but I’m extremely leery of dropping songs by NFTs. I just feel like music is so devalued right now that it’s not really relevant, it doesn’t really make sense, he said.

But Edgar – whose music background is primarily in DJing and production – believes music NFTs can work if they are seen as community resources.

“For NFTs to work with music in the future, I envision a platform where musicians can make music, make sounds, trade them, sell them, collect them, and that creates a new community.”