Setting a Kahlo drawing on fire in search of an NFT spark

First came the mariachi band, a flame-juggling dancer and the models in swimsuits and ballgowns strolling by the pool of a Miami mansion.

Then the show began.

A businessman who built his wealth on waves of speculation – riding the dot-com wave of the 1990s and then the rapid growth of Bitcoin in recent years – stuck a drawing from the frame that he heralded as a page from Frida Kahlo personal diary.

Wearing a sequined blazer with the artist’s portrait on the back, he affixed the image to a martini glass filled with blue spirits. It was set on fire, and the artwork was reduced to ashes.

Attendees at the lavish July gathering, which was captured in a promotional video, had been notified that the drawing was “transformed into living forever in the digital realm” through the creation of non-fungible tokens that represented “the rebirth and immortality of a timeless piece.” Those who chose to purchase an NFT with the Ethereum cryptocurrency were promised exclusive access to events and the assurance that 30 percent of the proceeds would go to charity.

But with his entry into the murky world of NFTs, businessman Martin Mobarak also generated incredible headlines and an investigation by Mexican authorities, who are classifying Kahlo’s artworks as national monuments. Some observers doubted that a relatively unknown collector would have access to a rare Kahlo drawing, leading to accusations of fraud.

The destruction of “Fantasmones Siniestros” (“Sinister Ghosts”) was an example of the high stakes common in the NFT market, where a 97 percent drop in trading volume pushes some to extremes. Cryptocurrency and blockchain asset sales have often relied on hype cycles, and Mobarak acknowledged that he was looking to stir up controversy.

“I had to do something drastic to get attention,” he said in a wide-ranging interview about the project, which went under the radar until Mexico announced its investigation in late September.

After burning the artwork, Mobarak’s Frida.NFT company created 10,000 non-fungible tokens of the piece. But only four of the NFTs have been sold, some at a steep discount, according to Etherscan, amounting to less than $11,200 for a piece that Mobarak personally valued at $10 million.

“From one angle, Frida.NFT is a brazen scam; from the other it looks like a crime against art history,” Ben Davis, who constructed a frame-by-frame analysis of Mobarak’s party in Miami for Artnet News, said in an email. “I’m not sure which is worse.”

Mobarak said that by selling virtual copies of the Kahlo drawing, which depicts a surreal parade of animal monsters, he democratized access to something that had been sitting in a vault.

“If Frida Kahlo was alive today,” he said, “I would bet my life that if I asked to burn a small piece of her diary to bring smiles and a better quality of life to the children, she would say, ‘Go ahead! and do it. I’ll light the fire.'”

Although the frenzy surrounding NFTs has subsided since the early days of the coronavirus pandemic, as people stuck looking for new outlets to spend money, they continue to attract a smaller number of artists, investors and hucksters.

Unlike tangible collectibles like baseball cards, NFTs, which use the blockchain technology that publicly tracks ownership and underpins cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin and Ethereum, can give their creator a cut of every sale on the secondary market. They can also be a vessel for discussions about value: Both a Basquiat and a Bored Ape are only worth the price that two parties have agreed upon.

Destroying an artist’s work in the name of crypto is not unprecedented. Last year, an original Banksy was burned during a live stream before an NFT representing the artwork sold for $380,000. And Damien Hirst has burned millions of dollars’ worth of art for his ‘Currency’ project, where collectors were forced to decide whether to keep the physical or digital version of his dot paintings.

But NFTs are a relatively new arena for Mobarak, 57, a Mexican businessman who lives in Miami. His first major business venture came during the 1990s rise of online companies. After selling one of the first Internet providers in the Anchorage region before the dot-com bubble burst, he reinvented himself as an airline magnate and then developed an interest in prospecting. A prospective silver mine in Mexico never turned a profit. Bitcoin did it.

Mobarak said he used some of the money to buy the Kahlo drawing from a private collector in 2015, declining to say how much he spent on it or who he bought it from. A provenance report commissioned by Mobarak from Andrés Siegel, an art and antiques dealer in Mexico City, stated that a private collector had previously purchased the work from a Manhattan gallery called Mary-Anne Martin Fine Art.

Martin confirmed to The New York Times that she had twice sold the work, which the heir of a Venezuelan art critic, Juan Röhl, had received as a gift from Kahlo. She sold it first in 2004 to the Vergel Foundation and then in 2013 to a private collector after it was returned by the foundation. It was then part of an exhibition that toured cultural institutions such as the High Museum of Art in Atlanta and the Scuderie del Quirinale in Rome.

Martin said she could not provide the private collector’s identity or confirm whether the drawing Mobarak burned in Miami was genuine.

A copy of the provenance report posted on the Frida.NFT website says the approximately 9-by-6-inch drawing was made around 1945 with watercolor, crayon, pencil, pen and sepia ink. “This work corresponds to the characteristics in style and materials used by Frida Kahlo in her diary located in La Casa Azul in Coyoacán, Mexico,” Siegel wrote. He did not respond to requests for comment.

The artist’s works rarely come up for auction, making it difficult to assess their market value, but Kahlo completed around 150 paintings and a number of drawings before her death aged 47.

If the artwork was indeed authentic, Mobarak could face legal consequences; The National Institute of Fine Arts and Literature, Mexico’s leading cultural authority, acknowledged its investigation but would not comment further. “Deliberate destruction of an artistic monument constitutes a crime under the Federal Act on Archaeological, Artistic and Historic Monuments and Zones,” the government said in a statement in September.

Gregorio Luke, a former Mexican diplomat and former director of the Museum of Latin American Art in Long Beach, California, said violating the Mexican monument law could lead to as much as a decade-long prison sentence and a fine equal to the cost of the artwork. “I think this man should be put in jail,” he said.

Leila Aminedoleh, a lawyer specializing in art and cultural heritage law, said she was not aware of any cases in which Mexico had enforced its cultural heritage laws for the destruction of works of art by Kahlo, but that Mobarak was in a legal conundrum.

“If he actually burned it, he’s breaking a law,” she said. “And if he didn’t, if it was a reproduction, then he may have violated copyright law. And if he copied the original with the intent to deceive, that could be fraud.”

Mobarak, who claims the Kahlo drawing was genuine, said he did not consult a lawyer before deciding to burn the artwork. He got the idea after noticing that an auction at Sotheby’s attracted attention last year when one of Kahlo’s final self-portraits became the most expensive Latin American work of art ever sold at auction, at $34.9 million.

His event in Miami in July was put together quickly, according to Gabrielle Pelicci, who helped plan the evening with two weeks’ notice. Referring to a charity stunt that went viral on social media in 2014, she said Mobarak had hoped the burn would be like the “ice bucket challenge but with fire”.

Still, it may be Mobarak’s reputation that has been sung. Asked if he wished he hadn’t burned the Kahlo artwork, he took a long pause and sighed. “I like to say I don’t regret it.”