A plague of apes has spread across social media. Wherever you look, blank simian faces stare back at you. Their features? Sickening. Their prices? Equally so.
The apes have brought in more than $1 billion (£750 million) in sales. Eminem, Mark Cuban and Shaquille O’Neal are just some of the famous names who own an ape. Where have they come from? What do they mean? How can we get rid of them?
The Bored Ape Yacht Club sells NFTs. In essence, an NFT — which stands for ‘non-fungible token’ — is a unique piece of data stored on a blockchain, a digital ledger, which can be associated with a work of art, or music, or literature. Bored Ape NFTs are associated with images of, well, bored apes.
Even in a time where definitions of ‘art’ have been watered down to the point that Jeff Koons is called an ‘artist’ rather than a ‘hack fraud’, Bored Apes are not art.
Some have started arguing that Bored Apes, or at least the people behind them, are connected to racism
If they are art then so is the chewing gum I just dodged in the street. Each ape looks as unsightly and gormless as the next, gazing off into the distance without charm, or wit, or any more poetic gravitas than that which is possessed by a drunk middle manager cooking up a really satisfying belch. They have minor differences in style but the same deep existential vacuity.
To be fair, no one is buying the apes for the apes. What is important is less the image, which anyone can copy, but what it represents. Owning an ape earns one access to a private club, with an online forum and real life events. Solely by the virtue of the scarcity of these insufferable simians, it is an exclusive one.
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