Collages have always been a fascinating form of art: they can be surreal, fun and imaginative. Throughout the decades quite a few artists engaged with this form of art achieving brilliant results, the latest one is Mike Winkelmann.
Better known as Beeple, the South Carolina-based graphic designer and motion and digital artist entered art history last week when a monumental collage he created over 5,000 days was sold online at Christie's for $69,346,250 in a single lot sale. The peculiarity about this piece is that it is the first purely digital artwork.
The genesis of the artwork is now well-known: Winkelmann, who can boast high-profile collaborations with global brands ranging from Louis Vuitton to Nike, as well as performing artists from Katy Perry to Childish Gambino, started posting a new work of art - that he called "everyday" - online from 1st May 2007.
He continued to do so every day for the next 13-and-a-half years and then proceeded to collage together the images (in loose chronological order, so if you zoom in you will see a wide range of images inspired by themes such as society's obsession with and fear of technology and wealth, but also political or personal themes) in one digital work entitled "Everydays: The First 5000 Days" (21,069 x 21,069 pixels; 319,168,313 bytes).
The collage is a sort of tapestry chronicling the evolution the artist went through, from basic drawings to abstract images made with 3D tools; some of the images are used as reflections about personal experiences like a nasty food-poisoning, others comment about events like the fly that landed on US Vice President Mike Pence during a vice-presidential debate last October or the siege on Capitol Hill in January.
This was the first time a major auction house offered a purely digital work with a unique NFT, or Non-Fungible Token (minted on 16 February 2021 exclusively for Christie's). The artwork was bought by MetaKovan, the founder and financer of Metapurse (the largest NFT fund in the world). This was also the first time Christie's accepted a cryptocurrency – Ethereum – among the other forms of payment (sale price of the artwork in Ethereum: 42329.453 ETH) .
The buyer of this artwork will receive a unique NFT (issued by digital marketplace MakersPlace), encrypted with the artist's unforgeable signature and uniquely identified on the blockchain.
Christie's already used this technology in November 2018, when it registered the entire 42-lot Barney A. Ebsworth Collection of 20th-century American Art on the Artory blockchain (the collection totalled more than $322 million, marking the first time an art auction at this price level was digitally recorded). In October 2020 Christie’s also offered Robert Alice's "Block 21" as part of its Post War & Contemporary Art Day Sale. This was the first work of art with an embedded NFT to be offered at a traditional auction house. The auction was very successful as the lot attracted non-traditional bidders and crypto enthusiasts alike - and sold for almost 11 times its low estimate.
Now one point to notice about this news story is not the quality of the artwork per se, but the technology behind it. Embedded NFTs and the use of cryptocurrencies are opening up an entirely new market with very different collectors from your usual ones.
CryptoArt and NFTs are booming right now: there are many platforms such as Nifty Gateway, SuperRare, Known Origin, Foundation and MakersPlace where artists can sell their work; musician Grimes raised arounf $6m through auctioning digital works at the beginning of March, while a few weeks before that, in February, Chris Torres' digital rendition of the Nyan Cat meme from 2011, with its cute cartoon cat with a Pop-Tart for its body flying with a trail of rainbows - sold for about US$590,000 (300 EHT) at an online auction.
Just a few days ago an original Banksy - Morons, a critique of the art market - was burnt and destroyed in a livestreamed video by owners Injective Protocol, a blockchain firm, then it was sold via a digital token representing the work for $380,000. In this way the value of the physical piece was moved on to the NFT.
Yet, while there is definitely an interest in this new art market, there are also a lot of doubts about it. Surely the blockchain technology provides secure ownership and also offers artists the possibility of eliminating gallery commissions and expenses for art fairs.
Yet, as the proverbial adage says, all that glitters is definitely not gold. NFTs can indeed be hacked: multiple people took to Twitter to report that their accounts on Nifty Gateway (that allows users to do their purchases with their credit cards, while other sites like SuperRare require users to have a digital wallet to purchase pieces using Ethereum) were hacked on Sunday, and their NFTs were transferred to other accounts), but there are also issues, such as copyright and intellectual property, to consider.
Thanks to NFTs, images, videos, music and other creative products can be digitally represented. Once created, an NFT can't be duplicated without permission, yet there isn't at the moment any specific regulation nor regulatory structure about the creation of NFTs that may keep copyrighted materials from being minted and sold as NFTs. This means that some people have been making NFTs without the consent of their creators or copyright holders. The problem is that once an NFT is minted, there is no way to remove it from the blockchain or secondary market.
There are for example services that allow you to tokenise other people's content, from art and web pages to Twitter posts such as Tokenized Tweets or MarbleCard. Both turn work into a tradable digital asset without the permission of the author, but the first allows you to tokenise all sorts of tweets, the second allows you to transform a URL into a digital card. All Marble cards are non-fungible tokens built on Ethereum and, once a card is created, the frame for that URL is claimed forever, then a Dutch auction starts and the card is yours to claim if no one buys it, but if someone buys it, you get rewarded.
Another - and not less important issue - is the energy consumption of CryptoArt: minting artwork on the blockchain employs large quantities of energy as this form of art is essentially a piece of metadata attached to a token and archived on a blockchain. Besides, the CryptoArt market is directly linked with cryptocurrencies.
There is one essential difference between cryptocurrencies and NFTs, the former are fungible tokens (you can trade them); being non-fungible the latter cannot be swapped for another NFT without entering a marketplace. Yet, you mine cryptocurrencies, and you mint NFTs (that is you register them on the blockchain). All these operations consume energy (check out usage and emissions of individual NFTs at cryptoart.wtf). Some artists producing CryptoArt are pledging to invest some of the money from their sales in eco-friendly projects and forest conservation, but that wouldn't be enough to cut energy waste. Besides, while it wouldn't be impossible to make these operations more sustainable, it is still very difficult considering that even green energy has got its costs (think about solar cells, wind turbines, etc).
There's obviously another point linked with criptocurrencies - their instability. In 2018 while writing a piece about cryptocurrencies, Bitcoin had risen to $8,000; at the time of writing this post, three years later, it is fluctuating around $57,000, a meteoric rise, while Ethereum has reached $1.775,84 USD.
But if cryptocurrencies are unstable, so are digital files, entities subject to storage degradation that easily become obsolete when a new system or a new update arrives on the market.
So does CryptoArt empower artists? Well, it can surely provide you with a fortune if you're genuinely talented and lucky enough, but, because of the points highlighted above, it is unlikely that CryptoArt will immediately replace the art market and physical art fairs. At the same time, it will certainly keep on growing, and generating new interests.
After all, we have seen quite a few developments for what regards cryptocurrencies, blockchain and NFTs in different fields. In 2018, Ronchini Gallery announced it was selling a c-type print on aluminium of the photograph "Nimbus Powerstation" (2017) by Dutch artist Berndnaut Smilde and it only accepted payment through Bitcoin. Different companies have tried to employ blockchain, also in other areas. As you may remember from a previous post, in 2018 Brooklyn-based Civil Media Co. stated it was going to create a sort of a blockchain-based network for journalism, while French luxury goods conglomerate LVMH introduced the AURA blockchain in 2019. The latter employs ERC-721 non-fungible tokens (ERC-721 tokens arrived at the end of 2017 with the CryptoKitties, one of the first blockchain games) and the technology was created to prove the authenticity of high-priced luxury goods, but also track the products from raw materials and original components to point of sale and follow those products on the used-goods markets.
So, what about fashion? Will we also have a CryptoFashion market? In a way, considering the various experiments in digital fashion, it already exists but it hasn't been exploited yet: as you may remember from a previous post, in 2019 there was a collaboration between Dapper Labs (better known for creating the CryptoKitties blockchain phenomenon), Dutch startup and digital fashion house The Fabricant and artist Johanna Jaskowska, creator of one of Instagram Stories' most popular filters - Beauty3000. The collaboration resulted in a unique digital dress, dubbed "Iridescence" for its futuristic multi-coloured and shiny nuances, that was sold at an auction at the Ethereal Summit in New York for $9,500 (obviously paid in cryptocurrency). So, who knows, maybe pushed by Coronavirus and digital runways, we may have a CryptoFashion industry (will it be possible to buy digital Haute Couture on dedicated platforms?) and a CryptoFashion Week sooner than expected. But, if you think this sounds very intriguing, always bear in mind the perils and pitfalls of the crypto world.
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