An unearthed Whitney Houston song, that she recorded when she was 17 years old, sold on Tuesday night (December 14) for $1 million at auction.
Videos by American Songwriter
The auction took place on the OneOf NFT platform, which is the green music NFT platform backed by Quincy Jones, and the winning bid was the highest priced NFT auction item on the Tezos(XTZ) blockchain.
An NFT, or Non-Fungible Token, is a unique digital asset that can not be replicated.
In total, the full Houston collection, which includes the song along with rare images and videos, has garnered over $1.1 million in sales to date.
The collection also includes a digital video created by the standout 17-year-old artist Diana Sinclair. Below you can watch a conversation between Sinclair and the executor of the Whitney Houston Estate, Pat Houston.
When asked about creating work centered on someone she’d never met and especially someone as ubiquitous as Houston, Sinclair said, “It really was an entire another level. It was definitely difficult to process at first. The way that I normally process things is just to dive right into the work, which is what I was able to do.”
The proceeds from the auction will go to the Whitney E. Houston Foundation, a nonprofit which works to support young creatives to reach their goals.
Other items in The Whitney Houston OneOf collection feature thousands of affordable, fixed-price NFTs as well as Gold and Platinum items, including rarely-seen archival photos from Houston’s early life and career, designed as a digital scrapbook. The Diamond tier features Sinclair’s video artwork inspired by many of Houston’s songs and music videos, including “The Greatest Love of All,” “I’m Every Woman,” and “I Will Always Love You.”
“I’m excited to see Whitney’s legacy and her wonderful music expand into bold new technology of this era,” said Pat. “It was a joy partnering with 17-year-old Diana Sinclair and watching the artistry of Whitney’s music influence a new generation.”
“Before shooting, I spent a lot of time consuming not only the music that Whitney sang but also the visuals that surrounded her,” said Sinclair in a statement, who pulled different themes from photoshoots around Houston’s music videos. “I saw a common theme in a lot of her work, the empowerment of Black women. One of my favorite examples of that was in the music video for her song, ‘I’m Every Woman.’ Whitney’s talent and presence stands out a lot to me as a young black woman in the arts. It’s empowering to me to see such positive, often playful, depictions of black women in media, and matriarchal love and perseverance, like in the ‘Greatest Love of All’ music video and song.”
“Whitney is an icon for the ages,” said Joshua James, co-founder, OneOf. “We couldn’t be more excited to be releasing this historical song from the very beginning of her journey as an artist.”
Photo by Dave Hogan/Getty Images
Sorry but that’s not how NFTs work. There is no content in an NFT, it can only point to content. You can’t duplicate an NFT but nothing stops you from duplicating the content, or even changing or replacing it. No real value in an NFT.
And I wonder if the 17-year-old artist who felt it was “an entire another level” will get to finish high school, or at least English class.