In the intro to “Lose Yourself” by Eminem, he asks the listener, “If you had one shot or one opportunity to seize everything you ever wanted in one moment, would you capture it, or just let it slip?”
I can only imagine this is exactly what the anonymous NFT artist known as Dickasso asked themself upon realizing that no one else had yet capitalized upon the pun to sell digital illustrations of penises. On the sex worker-centric crypto/NFT platform CumRocket, Dickasso has made more than $100,000 selling relatively crude, pixelated pictures of penises. As confoundingly dumb as buying virtual ownership of these images is, I’m frankly just upset that I didn’t have the foresight to corner the market and make these NFTs myself.
In an initial series of 100 dick pic NFTs, Dickasso illustrated penises in a variety of costumes — the Cock Ness Monster, Count Dickula and Crabdick being among my personal favorites. Initially minted in late October 2021, the earliest versions of the series sold for only 420 Cummies each, or $13. The latest versions are now being sold for a minimum of 18,000 Cummies, or $536 if you purchase directly from Dickasso, but some are being resold by prior buyers for as much as 1,000,000 Cummies or $29,506.53. I’d love to ask him about this, but sadly, he didn’t return my request for comment.
Of course, with the rise of NSFW NFTs, Dickasso certainly isn’t the only person capitalizing upon the opportunity to sell dick doodles — they might just be one of the lucky ones to make this much money from such stupid drawings. On CumRocket, there are several other artists selling cartoon dicks, many of which are a bit more artfully rendered. One creator, Dosde, has a series called Little Cute Dicks, a collection of neon-colored short penises described as a way to “show your love for dicks of all sizes.” An artist who goes by the name Pidickle also offers illustrations of pickles with boobs and dicks.
Meanwhile, another creator named Mofallus, who offers pixelated dicks in a slightly different style than Dickasso, states that 100 percent of the proceeds from the sales of his illustrations are donated to Movember “in support of men’s mental health, suicide prevention, prostate cancer and testicular cancer.” All three of these artists have NFTs available for $207 or less.
There’s also plenty of precedent for people spending absurd amounts of money on both NFTs and penis-related art in the past. An actual Picasso featuring a (semi-abstract) erect penis sold for $155 million in 2013, the most a collector had ever spent on a single piece of artwork at the time. NFTs of pixelated portraits of various characters called CryptoPunks regularly sell for a couple million. One recently sold for a record-breaking $500 million, but it was “purchased” by the person who already owned it, making it more of a currency exchange than anything else.
With the exception of raising money for charity, which is noble, all of this is rather silly — but so are economics and the art world writ large. The U.S. dollar isn’t backed by anything “real,” and some of the most financially successful artists in the world like Jeff Koons and Richard Prince have made their fortunes from reappropriating familiar imagery. Their work, and the money that surrounds it, is arguably just as dumb.
So, why shouldn’t you be able to purchase pixel art of a penis dressed as a boxer in a currency called Cummies? Surely, many of us look upon these illustrated dick pics and think, “I could have done that.” The difference between us and Dickasso, though, is that we didn’t.
Magdalene Taylor
Magdalene Taylor is a staff writer at MEL. She covers internet culture, sex and the online adult industry. She lives in Brooklyn but is from God's Country, Western Massachusetts.
