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Focus on This: — None Other Than Grandmaster Melle Mel’s Image in a First-Ever NFT by Famed Hip Hop Photographer Ernie Paniccioli

Jerry Ashton
4 min readOct 2, 2021

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Photo by Ernie Paniccioli

Ernie Paniccioli, named earlier this year as the Let’s Rethink This Inaugural Impact Artist to celebrate his lifetime of achievements and his historic role in capturing with his camera the world of Hip Hop from its very birth, is now capturing a new audience — art collectors who specialize in acquiring historic and significant NFT’s (non-fungible tokens).

At 1:20 PM EST on Thursday, September 30, in partnership with Let’s Rethink This, Ernie “dropped” an NFT of the famed Hip Hop artist, Grandmaster Melle Mel. The auction is scheduled to be completed at 1:20 PM EST on Monday, October 4.

The collector, whomever he/she may be, will be acquiring history. Among all the 20,000 “Brother Ernie” photos archived in the rare manuscripts and records section of the Cornell University Library, only one was chosen as his first venture into the rendering of his art for sale as an NFT on the Open Sea platform.

Who will be the purchaser — and their motivation?

Don’t count out major institutions. In a recent story in bitcoin.com, payment giant VISA announced the purchase this past week of an NFT from the collection CryptoPunk for around 495 ETH (Ethereum) or $150,000. The…

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Jerry Ashton
Jerry Ashton

Written by Jerry Ashton

Navy Journalist veteran, co-founder of Undue Medical Debt and founder of www.End VeteranDebt.org.

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