For musician and visual artist Jimmy Edgar, NFTs are intangible—but that’s not a bad thing.
In the world of music, Edgar has worked with people like Vince Staples, Charli XCX, Miguel, Machinedrum, and remixed “Babylon” by Lady Gaga. But it also branches alone with NFTs.
Edgar is releasing an Ethereum NFT collection on August 11th called OXYGEN, consisting of 13 artworks that play with the viewer’s concept of the immaterial, liquid, air and consumptive symbols of age adult
“Through a metaphysical process that Jimmy makes ‘digital condensation,’ the imagination solidifies as literal objects,” says a press release.
The NFTs will be displayed at the Vellum LA NFT gallery in a solo exhibition in Los Angeles from August 11 to September 11 and will also be sold on the Foundation’s NFT marketplace. Alice Scope and Sinziana Velicescu curated the exhibition.
NFTs—unique blockchain tokens that signify ownership—are connected to the digital art they authenticate. Edgar is comfortable with the abstract concepts of blockchain and digital tokens in part because OXYGEN NFTs deal so directly with the idea of immateriality and the potential changes of the state of matter.
“I see Ethereum as a layer of the medium of art,” he told Decrypt in an interview, adding that Ethereum’s NFTs essentially function as a “super futuristic certificate of authenticity” for digital art.
Like the OXYGEN collection, Edgar’s previously released NFT OBJECTZ and OPTIONZ collections also incorporate 3D-rendered images, surrealist physicalities, punchy color gradients, and sometimes inspiration from the artist Jeff Koons.
“There’s always a bit of humor in my art,” Edgar said of his work. “There’s always a little bit of sarcasm.”
Edgar entered NFTs for the first time in early 2021. His friends in the music industry had become excited about the potential of NFTs, and Edgar was quick to embrace the idea but wanted to apply it to the visual arts.
“My whole life is pretty much existing 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 physics—doesn’t devalue NFTs for Edgar. Instead, he sees it as part of the evolution of thought and visual art, and the intangibility of digital assets is a theme explored in his work.
“We’re kind of this generation that’s moving into the immaterial – we’re moving up the dimensions and becoming more immaterial,” he said. “I have a lot of patience and conviction for cryptocurrency as a digital medium.”
When it comes to music, Edgar considers songs as invisible sculptures.
“I’ve always seen music as sculpting in a way,” he shared. “Music is somewhat immaterial in the way that you don’t see it, you just feel it and hear it.”
While he sees immense potential for visual art NFTs, Edgar doesn’t feel the same way about current NFT applications for music—so don’t expect any songs from him to land on the NFT Royal music platform or any nowhere else soon.
“I’ve seen, you know, a lot of talk and hype about music NFTs, but I’m extremely skeptical of removing NFTs songs. I just feel that music is so devalued right now that it’s not really relevant, it doesn’t make much sense,” he said.
But Edgar—whose music background is primarily in DJing and production—thinks music NFTs can work if they’re seen as community assets.
“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 create a new community.”
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