No article on Mona Onyx would be complete without addressing the firestorms that follow her. In May 2024, she staged “Burn to Earn,” a live-streamed performance where she set fire to a hard drive containing the only copy of a $2.2 million painting by Jean-Michel Basquiat (which she had legally purchased at auction) and simultaneously minted an NFT of the burning process. The art world erupted. Traditionalists called it “performative nihilism.” Crypto-evangelists hailed it as a perfect allegory for digital rebirth. The NFT sold for 850 ETH (approx. $2.8 million at the time).
Mona Onyx: The Rise of Digital Art’s Enigmatic Provocateur
Months later, she was accused of “copyminting” (unauthorized replication of NFTs) when a collector discovered that one of her “Broken Halo” variants shared a 92% structural similarity with a 2022 piece by a little-known artist named Zena K. Onyx responded not with a legal defense but by purchasing Zena K’s entire remaining collection, burning half of it, and displaying the other half in a joint virtual gallery titled “We Are All Forks.” The controversy eventually subsided, but it left a lingering question: In the age of generative AI, what does originality even mean?
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