Nfts
Stormtrooper Scandal Review: This NFT Racket Was a Perfect Storm of Greed, Stupidity, and Gullibility
A hugely entertaining documentary about art curator Ben Moore’s questionable Art Wars project
I’m ready to sell you one of my thoughts. You can’t see it, hear it, touch it, taste it, or smell it, because, well… it’s a thought, and thoughts don’t have physical substance.
But think of it this way: it’s a unique thought, a true original. There is no other thought like it in the world, and it can be yours for as little as a few thousand dollars.
Okay, let’s stop with this nonsense. You’d have to be really stupid to pay a lot of money for something that doesn’t exist in the real world. But there are plenty of really stupid people in the hugely entertaining documentary The Stormtrooper Scandal (BBC2, Thursday June 20).
The stupidest of them might well be the man at the center of the story, curator and artist Ben Moore, who was a well-known figure in the London art scene. Moore is the worst truly stupid person: someone who thinks he’s incredibly smart.
A few years ago, Moore acquired a Star Wars stormtrooper costume, sprayed it hot pink and paraded around London in it, having his picture taken in different poses – part artistic, part to show off. The pink stormtrooper has become a sort of alter ego for him.
Then he had another brilliant idea. He sourced many iconic stormtrooper helmets and persuaded a number of leading British artists, including Damien Hirst, the Chapman Brothers, Antony Gormley, Chemical X and D*FACE, to customize them with their own designs unique.
The results were presented in an exhibition called Art Wars. The artists were happy to do it for nothing since Art Wars was a charity project. Chemical »
Moore toured the exhibition for several years. When interest in the business waned, he had yet another brilliant idea, which he hoped would make him very, very rich very, very quickly.
In 2021, Moore announced that he would offer digital images of the exhibition’s helmets, each unique, for sale as non-fungible tokens (NFTs) priced at £2,000. The interest was sky-high.
Bran Symondson. Photo: BBC/DSP Ltd.
At the time, the craze for NFTs – 90% of which would be worthless today – was at a fever pitch, so there was no shortage of underdogs willing to shell out two thousand dollars for nothing more than pixels on a screen.
However, to make a lot of money, Moore would need many more images than those in the exhibition; he would need a few thousand. That’s where his shady associates come in, a pair of “crypto brothers” who went by the nicknames “Crypto Cowboy” and “NFT Master.”
Refugees in Bosnia, they compensated for the lack of images by producing poor quality artwork, most of which were just duplicates with slightly different colors.
“There was no shortage of saps to pay two thousand dollars for pixels on a screen”
Of course, the enthusiastic buyers had no idea. So when the online sale launched on November 6, 2021, the entire collection sold out in just five seconds. “I was going to own a piece of Star Wars history,” one NFT investor says in the documentary. No one would see the purchased image until three days after the sale.
Moore was suddenly rich beyond his wildest dreams. He posted a video of himself wearing his pink stormtrooper helmet, screaming and shouting about how he had won £2million overnight.
He became even richer over the next 48 hours as many of those who had purchased NFTs resold them to others at a higher price. For each resale, Moore and the crypto brothers receive a percentage.
All bubbles burst eventually, but this bubble bursts in record time. When investors finally got to see the images they had purchased, most of them were outraged to discover that they had spent a lot of money on digital trash.
This was nothing compared to the anger of the artists, who had not been informed that their intellectual property was being sold online, leading to the removal of the images, or of Lucasfilm, who did not appreciate the violation of copyright. ‘author.
It was the perfect storm of greed, stupidity and gullibility. It’s possible to have a tiny bit of sympathy for the fools who bought the NFTs, but not for Moore. He appears here, broke, mired in debt and self-pity, but showing no contrition.