Boerne artist Justin Bua ventures down the ‘NFT rabbit hole’

Justin Bua’s artwork — showcasing urban cultural figures such as DJs, break-dancers, graffiti artists and jazz musicians — has found its way onto millions of posters and prints, as well as skateboards, album covers and even the intro to an MTV sketch comedy series.

This year, more than three decades after he began working as an artist, he’s breaking new ground in his career by releasing his art as a series of NFTs, or non-fungible tokens.

If you’re unfamiliar with NFTs, you’re not alone. The concept is new to Bua’s fan base, he said. Growing in popularity in recent years, they are a form of digital artwork whose ownership can be established through the use of a data tool known as a blockchain.

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For Bua, who moved from Los Angeles to Boerne in 2020, that clarity of ownership is part of the appeal. He noted that many of his works, including his famous painting “The DJ,” have been widely reproduced without his permission.

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“I think the questions that you’re asking are the same things that my fans are asking: Like, ‘What do I do with this?’” said Bua, known professionally as BUA. “I think most people are buying it because they support me. We’re figuring out this space together.”

He launched the NFT collection this month during a party at the South by Southwest festival in Austin. The collection includes 1,000 unique NFTs based on another well-known work of his, “The MC,” showing a hip-hop master of ceremonies lifting his right leg to an unheard beat while he raises a microphone. Hidden among the NFTs are 11 “golden tickets,” which will earn the lucky recipients “something super-duper,” he said.

His plan is to turn the NFTs into tickets to what he calls the “BUAverse” — a virtual world he will build featuring characters from his artwork, including the MC and the DJ.

Bua recently sat to discuss NFTs, his decision to move to Boerne and his experience growing up in New York City’s Upper West Side in the 1970s and 1980s. The following has been edited for brevity and clarity.

Q: NFTs have been around for a while, but I feel that the average person would still ask, “What’s an NFT?”

A: What I love about it is, to me, with what I’m doing, NFTs are art. When I first knew about NFTs, I was like, “Ah, that seems like a gimmick.” But as I started to go down the NFT rabbit hole, I was like, “Wait a minute. There’s provenance here.”

Provenance is a really important thing, because in the art world, a lot of provenance is incorrect. A lot of art is not really the art that they say it is. Like, yeah, Rembrandt did a lot of his work, but a lot of students in his atelier did a lot of his work too. That might not be a Rembrandt hanging at The Hague, or that might not be a Picasso at the Met. But if they were NFTs, we could easily track and historically document the provenance. It’s on the blockchain.

Q: Are there other benefits?

A: We can have utility now. All of a sudden, you have my painting — you and I now have a personal relationship. Like, I’ve sold 14 million prints of “The DJ”; I don’t know who has those. Now, I could have a personal relationship with my collector. I can AirDrop them a free NFT, AirDrop them a free concert, whatever I want to do. So utility, provenance, authenticity and the fact that I could have a direct relationship makes NFTs — for me, as an artist in 2023 — super valuable.

Q: When someone buys an NFT, what do they get?

A: They get a digital version of my painting. That’s over-simplified, because this painting that I did for this NFT was created in an analog fashion on my crank easel, and then I scanned it into Photoshop and painted it in 185 layers, so that every single NFT is unique. It’s a painting that you get, that you could have as your avatar. You could project it onto your monitor. You could trade it on the secondary market. You can do whatever you want with it, because it’s your personal BUA original NFT.

Q: I think a question a lot of people have is, why would you pay for that when you could get a screen shot for free?

A: For all of the reasons that I said — utility, authenticity. There’s no utility if you’re not paying for it, because you get nothing with it. I think the other thing is that you’re supporting the artist, and the artist is thereby supporting you. This gets us into 2023 conversations. If Michelangelo or Leonardo — even better example because I think Leonardo was more out there in many ways, more forward-thinking. Leonardo would do this. Picasso would do this. Diebenkorn, de Kooning. Andy Warhol? He would have been the NFT king.

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Yeah, people screen shot my stuff all the time. They take my paintings and repaint them. They project them onto the walls. I’m the most bootlegged artist alive. This is a way to stop that.

Q: You’re releasing 1,000 NFTs. Did you do a separate painting for each?

A: Every background is hand-drawn and hand-painted. I think I have a total of 35 or 40 different ones. Then every single color is unique. In other words, there will be no NFTs that are redundant. Everything’s unique. “Oh, you got the blue-skin MC with the gold mic and the black pants and the subway background.”

Q: You’re selling these for $100, right? How many have you sold so far?

A: I don’t know, because I don’t do the numbers. But I would say we’re probably halfway, which is not bad considering it’s been on the market for 48 hours.

I’ll be honest with you. People who come from my community are not used to this. It is a very ivory-tower space. I don’t want my community of people to be left behind. As the future takes off, it ain’t gonna take off without us. I want to onboard noncrypto natives into the space, because we’re going digital with everything.

Q: I feel that NFTs are very correlated with cryptocurrency, which seems to be facing more skepticism with what’s happened to FTX. Could that hurt the NFT movement?

A: Not only FTX but Silicon Valley Bank, right? Let’s be honest here: These are crypto-friendly banks. I’ll equate it to the days of marijuana in California, when they were like, “That’s illegal. It’s a terrible thing. But if we can make money on it, we’re all about it.” Crypto is here to stay, whether we like it or not. Digital currency is here to stay, whether we like it or not. It’s going to happen, and the government is going to participate in the profits. NFTs are a great kind of middle space where you can have currency and art and connect it together.

Q: You grew up on the Upper West Side in the 1980s. What was that like?

A: The atmosphere was pretty gnarly, if I may use an LA word to describe a New York atmosphere. It was violent. It was corrupt. It was dangerous. But it was incredibly creative and poetic. I was a latchkey kid. When I was 6 years old, I used to take the train by myself. It was a wild time. I was raised on the streets in a lot of ways. My mom had to work to keep the lights on, so I was kind of babysat by a group of, you know, interesting people. But I saw early on that even though people had dark sides, there was a lot of humanity. I saw beyond the veil of, “I’m a drug dealer. I’m a gangster.” They were also people who had feelings and families. You know — it was complicated.

Q: How did you become interested in art?

A: My mom was a painter, and my grandfather was a letterer. My grandfather did Felix the Cat and Prince Valiant. My mom was a graphic designer and painter. She used to try to sell her goods in front of the Metropolitan Museum (of Art). I would just hang out with her and watch her hawk her goods, watch my grandfather sculpt and paint. And I was like, “I want to do that.”

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Graffiti was all around me, and I had very classical paintings in my home. My mom was very into education. She was (a New York University) English grad. So I was into Bruegel the Elder and Hieronymus Bosch, a lot of the painters primarily from the Flemish schools. Then I’d go outside and see a Futura 2000 and a DONDI and a REVOLT and a Zephyr. So it was the colliding of those worlds.

Q: Were you incorporating hip-hop into your art from the beginning?

A: I was doing it from the beginning, drawing guys with guns, people from my neighborhood — stuff where my teachers were like, “What are you doing? This is not art.”

Q: What’s it like living in Boerne, as someone who grew up in New York and lived in LA?

A: Different, quiet, peaceful. Just a complete change of lifestyle, but something necessary, where I could just think. I don’t have to go outside and have someone honk at me. I just don’t have to deal with stuff that I’ve dealt with my whole life. Growing up in New York, it feels like you’re on a treadmill. You don’t realize until you’re way out of New York that you were just on a treadmill the whole time. And then LA was a different kind of treadmill — the games, the playing, the noise of Hollywood.

Q: Boerne isn’t known for its hip-hop scene. Is it hard to be away from that?

A: No, because I can just go to Austin. I’m going to Austin today; I’m in San Antonio right now. I feel like Texas is kind of a mecca. You know, Texas has its own energy of culture.

Q: Are you planning to do more NFT releases?

A: Definitely. I don’t know when, but definitely. I’m just getting my feet wet in here. I’m feeling the space.

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