A young girl who became an internet sensation when a photo of her went viral is now selling an NFT for thousands of dollars at auction. NFTs are unique digital tokens which are often attributed to art that has no physical representation.
Chloe Clem, now 10, became famous in 2013 when her mother shared her unimpressed reaction to a surprise Disneyland trip online. The image has become a popular meme for expressing concern.
An NFT provides a digital certificate of ownership for the piece, but bears no copyright. Therefore the winner of the auction will own the digital token representing the meme, but not the meme itself. NFTs are usually bought in cryptocurrencies, so the transaction is recorded on a publicly available ledger called the blockchain.
One of the girls, Lily, started crying, she said, “but then the camera panned over and Chloe made her cute little buck-toothed side-eye face and the internet did the rest.” The video has been watched more than 20 million times, while the image of Chloe’s reaction became an internet sensation.
“I opened up Tumblr and there were just pages and pages of Chloe’s face,” her mother told the BBC. “It was very weird, very overwhelming. I had my family, friends sending me these memes – till this day they still send me the memes of Chloe they see on the internet.”
Within weeks, a Buzzfeed article had declared Chloe “the patron saint of Tumblr” and “the queen and goddess of the internet”. Now the Utah family has decided to auction off the image as an NFT. Bids start at 5 Ethereum – a form of cryptocurrency worth roughly $15,000 (£11,000).
Ms Clem said that after learning about the NFT market, selling the meme was a “no brainer”. “It’s a cool opportunity, especially if there’s a Chloe fan out there who loves this meme they’ll be able to own it. Even Chloe has said ‘that’s pretty cool’ – it’s a typical 10-year-old thing to say.”
The market for ownership rights to digital art has boomed recently after several multi-million-dollar NFT sales. In March, Twitter founder Jack Dorsey sold his first ever tweet for the equivalent of $2.9m to a Malaysia-based businessman.