David Cronenberg Is Auctioning Off An NFT Of His Kidney Stones

March 25, 2022 / Posted by:

Last September, Canadian director David Cronenberg got into the NFT game when he auctioned off his one-minute-long short, The Death of David Cronenberg. The film sold for 25 ether, which is approximately $90,000. David is known for fucked-up movies like The Fly, Videodrome, Scanners, and Crash (the 1996 flick about people who get turned on by car crashes, not the Best Picture winner about racism). He is considered a pioneer in the “body horror” film genre. So, for his latest NFT, David is serving us some very personal body horror: a photograph of his kidney stones.

The artwork is entitled Kidney Stones and Inner Beauty. It will be released through the CryptoArt marketplace SuperRare on March 28. The starting bid will be 15ETH (about $45,000). According to SuperRare’s press release, David produced the kidney stones over a span of about two years. He calls it his “Inner Beauty” collection, which is a reference to a comment made by one of the doctor characters, played by Jeremy Irons, in David’s 1988 psychological horror, Dead Ringers. He’s also connecting the photo to his upcoming movie, Crimes of the Future, which stars Viggo Mortenson as a performance artist who does public surgery on himself. He added:

 I see in these kidney stones a luminous narrative generated by a group of my inner organs, a narrative as intimate as a person could imagine. I think each stone presents a unique aesthetic of structure, colour, and organic content that engages with the mystery of my essence, my reality, which is my body, inside and out.

David also spoke to Newsweek about the NFT. He explained that he originally took the photo of the kidney stones for a friend, who was passing his own for the very first time. David says that, up until then, he’d been keeping his little stones in a pill bottle. He thought the photograph turned out “quite beautiful, in such a weird way,” adding:

“My body has gone to great lengths to create these amazing shapes,” he said, noting that one person who saw the photo compared the unique aesthetic of each stone to “strange sea creatures.”

Here’s the image and a press release from SuperRare, including David’s full artist’s statement:

See, this is where the NFT thing confuses me. For a split second, I was like, “Oh cool! Someone’s gonna buy those kidney stones and put them in a jar in their bathroom, like my mom does with seashells!” But no. It’s just the image. Which, I too, can copy and paste and keep on my computer, free of charge. There! I did it! And nobody can do shit about– huh. What’s this? A call from an unknown number? “Hello?… The FBI?!… Holy shit… No, I’ll delete it, I’ll delete it!”

Pic: INSTAR

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