Bored Ape Yacht Club made its worldwide debut last night at the MTV Video Music Awards with a volatile virtual performance by rap icons Eminem and Snoop Dogg for their song “From the D 2 the LBC.”
Although the event was unprecedented, NFT critics were unmoved and took to social media in droves to express their disdain for the spectacle.
“The animation is hardly better than what we had 25 years ago,” digital artist Dragonair tweeted.
“Gorillas did this two decades ago and it was so much better than animators,” Montgomery Edwards wrote on Twitter.
Bored Ape Yacht Club is a popular chain of NFTs minted on the Ethereum blockchain. Non-fungible tokens, known as NFTs, are unique tokens that are encrypted associated with digital and physical content, providing proof of ownership. A premium status token usually sells for several thousand dollars, with more and more high-profile celebrities buying. The current market value of the Bored Ape group is $1.2 billion, according to the decentralized application analytics website Dappradar.
Others took their criticism to the Eminem subreddit, which has more than 214,000 subscribers. No fewer than ten leads were dedicated to VMA performances, a few of which were free, and many took the opportunity to poke fun at the NFT group’s on-screen appearance.
One Redditor wrote: “Marshall looked much better in 50 Cent: Bulletproof FROM 2005.”
Another user wrote, “Let me start by saying I love Eminem as much as everyone else in this sub, but this VMA performance honestly made me laugh at how pathetic it was.”
“It’s 3:30 in my country, and I’ve been waiting for this shit all night?” Post wrote.
Yuga Labs, the company behind Bored Ape Yacht Club, grants the owner of individual NFTs a broad license to use the image they own. While criticism of NFTs and the Bored Apes Yachting Club persists – for example, for the environmental impact of NFTs instrument – so does pressure to incorporate digital holdings into the mainstream media.
Other Bored Ape projects in progress include an upcoming animated series from Seth Green, “White Horse Tavern,” about a world where NFTs live alongside humans.
No doubt, NFT haters are rooting for the first time.