Heidi Klum Made 10 Paintings Based on Bored Ape Yacht Club NFTs

Years after NFTs first began to become widely known among the general public, it’s now become commonplace for celebrities to dip their toe into the world of cryptocurrency and digital tokens, and Heidi Klum has just become the latest in a long line that includes Matt Damon, Lindsay Lohan, and Tom Brady.

In a new interview with Artnet, the famous model, who has long painted on the side, revealed that she will be releasing a series of 10 paintings based on the now-famous Bored Ape Yacht Club NFTs, a collection of unique digital tokens that have fetched as much as $1.22 million at auction.

This is a bit of the update to the celebrity pattern when it comes to NFTs: Thus far, the rich and famous have mostly touted their involvement with the blockchain world by minting NFTs of their own, rather than making original art based on NFTs.

It’s also worth noting that the Bored Ape Yacht Club NFTs are extremely ugly. Each NFT in the series depicts a different, newspaper cartoon-like monkey sporting a wig, a checkered shirt, or gold teeth, among many other flourishes.

“Last year I wrote that the problem with NFTs was their aesthetics, and everything else (high prices, environmental degradation, the possibility of being indoctrinated into an evil worldwide cult) was a distraction: the problem was tasteless, puerile, nostalgic aesthetics,” art critic Dean Kissick wrote in Spike magazine earlier this month.

For whatever reason, the Bored Apes left Klum inspired: one of her paintings just debuted on a digital billboard in Times Square, and as part of Apefest, she’ll also release 10 (you guessed it) NFTs.

“Most people have artists create their NFTs for them,” Klum told Artnet. “But I wanted to create my own, because I love doing painting. My idea was to paint on 10 of the most important NFTs out there, which next to the Cryptopunks, are the Bored Apes. I found someone who owns many of them and was willing to let me paint on them. I went into a studio downtown, a gigantic warehouse, had them all hung from the ceiling. And then I just gave myself 12 hours to paint all of them, which was crazy, but so much fun at the same time.”

Good for her.