Last week, Mike Winkelmann, the digital artist better known as Beeple, sold his piece “Everydays – The First 5000 Days” at an auction for more than $ 69 million. This stunning sum made him the third best-selling living artist of all time, behind Jeff Koons and David Hockney.
The sale was notable for a number of reasons, but the main one was the fact that art, a collage of 5,000 smaller digital works of art, exists only in the digital space. More specifically, the buyer, known only as MetaKovan, did not receive a physical copy of the piece. Instead, they were given a media file, hundreds of megabytes in size, and an NFT – or non-fungible token, a blockchain-backed contract attesting that they owned the original digital copy.
There was a lot of handshake for everyone. Is there real value in NFTs or was all of this just the result of a market bubble? Do NFTs represent an existential ecological threat? Was the play itself good?
It depends on who you ask – everyone seems to have an opinion on this young market.
The Beeple compound that sold for $ 69.3 million. (Christie’s / TNS)
Christie’s / TNSAway from all the last-minute headlines on the Internet, however, Bay Area artists and designers – many of whom worked in the digital token space for months or years before “NFT” became a little-understood familiar expression – seemed unconcerned with the most recent media advertising campaign cycle (even though the cost of minting NFTs is increasing). Instead, they were focused on what they see as new futures in form, both financially and artistically. As a San Francisco artist, Göksu Ilgaz Koçakcıgil (also known as @skywaterr), add: “When I realized that I could make money from my own digital art, I was totally impressed. I was like my life was about to change. “
Corbin Bell, or @PixelActivist, moved to San Francisco two years ago. For a long time, he felt out of place, unable to find a single design job. “I literally never got an interview in two years,” he said. He ended up driving to Postmates and Caviar to pay the rent. Then, last summer, he started hearing about NFT technology. He decided to try to coin his own work.
It took months of trial and error, but on February 6 he finally made his first sale. The piece, “Enter the Chain”, a loop video of a spiral parking lot with an MC Escher feel, went to .385 Ether, the currency supported by the Ethereum blockchain – somewhere around $ 640 at the time. It was the first time that he sold a piece of his art. He has since sold three other pieces. Two of them cost an Ethereum each – about $ 1,500 each.
“Enter the Chain” by PixelActivist
Courtesy of Corbin Bell“It’s a way of doing what you really love. There are no concessions, ”says Bell. Before long, the NFTs have become a path to financial stability for him and other artists he knows. “It just paved the way for the misfits, as tacky as it sounds.”
When Bell talks about a new way for the misfits, he’s not just talking about money. There is also a feeling that this new technology can support communities. Danny Jones, a self-taught graphic designer from San Francisco who also serves for Yasly, sold his first NFT, “Super Wild”, on February 18, the day after listing it, for 1.99 Ether (or about $ 3,900 on era). The piece is a comforting looping video of frozen flowers in a translucent rainbow block that is always spinning.
Jones took this and other money he earned from NFT sales and reinvested it in other artists. “I just bought an NFT from my friend … I won the auction (theirs) and I was able to support it in a tangible way. Money is definitely not the only motivator for any of this for me. “
Non-fungible tokens are not new, strictly speaking; they have existed, in one way or another, for about six years.
They are supported by the same type of blockchain technology that supports multiple cryptocurrencies. In this case, Ethereum is the currency of choice. But unlike individual Ethers, which are interchangeable with each other, NFTs are unique. Essentially, artists can go to a stock exchange, “coin” their art as an NFT and auction it off. (Sometimes, they also include a physical copy with the sale.) At the moment, most NFTs are inclined towards the visual arts, but it is also possible to mint certificates for digital business cards, music albums, video games and even experiments. Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey signed and sold the first tweet he posted.
After steadily growing in popularity last year – Beeple’s first sale, for $ 6,666.66, occurred in October – the technology went mainstream last month. That’s when celebrity culture came into play. Musician Grimes sold $ 6 million in NFTs. The classic Nyan Cat meme – a cat with a poptart body, propelled through space by a rainbow exhaust – sold for just under $ 600,000.
Both Bell and Jones have listed their pieces on the Foundation, a guest-only NFT listing site popular with artists from the Bay Area. Kayvon Tehranian, the website’s CEO, says the Foundation was launched with 50 artists in February, after a year of closed experimentation with NFTs, and now they list thousands of artists. “I could give you a number and that number will be very out of date tomorrow.”
Mixed media artist Göksu Ilgaz Koçakcigill, also known as @skywaterr, examines a pile of her work in her studio on Friday, March 12, 2021 in San Francisco, California.
Lea Suzuki / The ChronicleThe current explosion of attention, says Tehran, is undoubtedly part of the usual internet advertising cycle, but that does not mean that NFTs are a short-term trend. “You have artists who are completely reorienting their practices around this technology.” He describes NFTs as a “new layer” for the Internet, which has the potential to fundamentally change the way things work. “People have a hard time seeing this because … exponential growth is very difficult to understand.”
Barry Threw, executive director of Gray Area, the Mission District art and technology space, spoke about the transformational potential of blockchain in similar terms. “We are in the CompuServe era of these things. Like, we haven’t accessed AOL or MySpace yet, or, you know, not even Facebook in terms of lineages, how technologies develop. “
At the moment, however, Threw describes it in simple terms: “It is an asset bubble, it is a bubble of hype and it offers some opportunities for artists to have some traction. … (But) it is a market that is as interested in buying memes as it is in buying art ”.
Traditional art institutions are also eyeing form. Representatives from YBCA and the Museum of Fine Arts said they have no plans to start collecting NFTs, but are watching how artists use the space.
A pulsating pink abstraction in an infinite loop sold fast.
Courtesy of Göksu Ilgaz Koçakcigil /Three years ago, while Koçakcıgil was majoring in visual communication design in the state of San Francisco, she looked around and “saw all this incredible digital work that no one was paying for” and imagined, one day, opening a digital art gallery, a real physical place with works of art on display.
Until recently, it felt more like a dream. She had files full of digital artwork that she “didn’t think anyone cared about”. Then, in November, she started joining cryptographic art communities and found out about NFTs, a discovery that changed the paradigm.
In January, she did her first work supported by the NFT and, earlier this month, she unveiled a new collection at the Foundation that she calls “BLÖBS”. To create each piece, she uses a mixture of physical and digital techniques and collaborates with artificial intelligence. “BLÖB No1” is a pulsating pink abstraction that moves in an infinite loop against a black screen.
It was sold on March 6 for 0.169 Ether – or about $ 310.
Ryan Kost is a writer for the San Francisco Chronicle. Email: [email protected] Twitter: @RyanKost