Jack Dorsey’s debut NFT was an image of the first-ever tweet posted on Twitter, which he founded in 2006. In March 2021, during the early days of the NFT boom, Dorsey’s tweet sold for $2.9 million after a competitive bidding battle in which Tron founder Justin Sun was a major player. Sun lost out to Sina Estavi, an entrepreneur who has since faced economic turmoil as his crypto-enterprises collapsed following his arrest last May.

Then, this month, Estavi listed the NFT for $48 million and tweeted that he would given 50 percent of the proceeds to GiveDirectly, a charity whose mission is to help impoverished people in certain parts of Africa. “Why not 99% of it?” Dorsey subsequently quipped.

But after Dorsey’s NFT went up for auction again this past week, no one bid higher than $280, effectively dropping the value of it by 99 percent. The highest offer now on OpenSea, where anyone can list an NFT, even if a bidding period isn’t open, is about $12,000, which is still a paltry amount. Is this a harbinger of the NFT market’s collapse?

For Jonathan Perkins, cofounder of the NFT platform SuperRare, the bungled sale is a symptom of the NFT market going through growing pains.

“There has been a lot of experimentation in the space, and I think we’re running up against the boundaries of speculation,” Perkins said, referencing the tokenization of tweets and the interest in PFP NFTs. He characterized the NFT market of 2021, especially of last summer, as one built on risk-taking behavior.

You’re on that old kick again, rereading Geoff Dyer’s Out of Sheer Rage to refresh and resplendorize the senses, but why not go back to the source? It’s never wrong to read Dyer’s Thomas Bernhard (and, after all, your Bernhard). It’s never bad to sit at Good Karma Café, in Philadelphia, at a little metal table out front, with Bernhard’s novella Walking, reading 

I ask myself, says Oehler, how can so much helplessness and so much misfortune and so much misery be possible? That nature can create so much misfortune and so much palpable horror. That nature can be so ruthless toward its most helpless and pitiable creatures. This limitless capacity for suffering, says Oehler. This limitless capricious will to procreate and then to survive misfortune. 

while a person pulls up with a carriage and introduces to the air a baby, a little baby who was born three days ago, and stands there holding this: “Lily.” She explains as much—the three-day thing—and announces the name to inquirers (the nonreaders …). Three days old only! Why is this little baby taking the air so soon? Why promenade now? This merciless tenderness might permeate the whole atmosphere now, while you read “My whole life long, I have refused to make a child, said Karrer, Oehler says, to add a new human being over and above the person that I am, I who am sitting in the most horrible imaginable prison and whom science ruthlessly labels as human,” and laugh at combinations, at the café. 

—Caren Beilin
You can read Sheila Heti’s interview with Caren Beilin on the Daily here. 

A 14th-century Hebrew manuscript is the subject of a lawsuit filed this week against the Israel Museum in Jerusalem. The institution has denied claims by heirs of a German-Jewish lawmaker that the museum has “illegal possession” of the religious book, which has been in its collection for nearly seventy years.

This is the first lawsuit against a museum in Israel to recover property lost in the Holocaust.

Four heirs of Ludwig Marum, a Jewish-German politician and public opponent of the Third Reich, brought forth the claim in a New York state court. In court documents reviewed by ARTnews, the attorney representing the heirs said the suit was filed in New York because the museum conducts business through the Manhattan nonprofit American Friends of the Israel Museum.

The medieval manuscript dubbed Bird’s Head Haggadah is believed to have been produced in southern Germany around the year 1300. It is known as the oldest surviving Ashkenazi Passover Haggadah, a volume containing ritual text that is used for religious observation. The lawsuit claims the book is worth an estimated $10 million.

Marum was killed in 1934 under official Nazi orders. Marum originally received the script as a wedding present, the suit says.

Famed artist Laurie Simmons and influential art market figure Amy Cappellazzo think that artists need to “pay attention to NFTs” and blockchain, and that the new phenomenon cannot be “brushed aside.”

Speaking at the spring luncheon for the American Friends of the Israel Museum at the Rainbow Room on Tuesday, Simmons and Cappellazzo engaged in a wide-ranging discussion that was mostly in a format Cappellazzo likened to Vogue’s ever-popular “73 Questions” interviews with celebrities.

After Simmons answered a series of rapid fire questions—What was your first thought today? Kittens or puppies?—Cappellazzo opened up to questions from the audience. The first was the one on every casual art watcher’s mind: “What do you think of NFTs?”

While Simmons and Cappellazzo were cagey at first, more or less saying they’re watching with interest but not ready to jump in the pool themselves, they both eventually signed on to the liberating potential of the blockchain, if not quite NFTs themselves.

“I’m more interested in NFTs as vehicles or mechanisms than actual end-art forms,” Cappellazzo said. “But I do think every artist these days needs to pay attention to NFTs because it’s the only way to track the work—on the blockchain—as it goes through the world. They’ll be able to get royalties, if they design it with that mechanism. It’s of incredible importance to artists.”