![]() ![]() When you have a painting on the wall you feel confident you own a piece of art, it wasn’t clear the same would be true of ownership of digital art recorded on a blockchain.”Ĭrypto Punks by Matt Hall and John Watkinson “The psychological question was whether people would feel like they even owned something under this system. In an interview with Art Market Guru magazine’s le Journal, Hall referred to the project as an experiment of sorts. In 2017 they launched the CyberPunks project, during which they sold 10,000 pixel figures, or to be more precise, 10,000 ownership certificates of the figures. After they had amassed a respectable number of characters, they decided to find a way to generate income from them. Watkinson and Hall were software engineers and app developers who enjoyed drawing figures in pixel art and decided to jointly establish Larva Labs to give free rein to their artistic tendencies. And then along came Matt Hall and John Watkinson. They may have been “internet famous,” with millions of followers on Instagram and commercial collaborations with super brands or A-list stars - but were still unable to enter galleries and museums or sell their works to collectors, cause there simply wasn’t any way to do it. But they didn’t have a platform to showcase and sell their artwork.” “Before the arrival of ‘nifties’ they generated income mostly from commercial jobs, working in advertising or merchandising like T-shirts depicting their work. “Most digital artists - 3D artists, animators, digital illustrators, etc… - make their money on commissions for their work,” explains art researcher Danielle Zini. “The Psychological Question was Whether People Would Feel Like They Even Owned Something”įor digital artists, crypto art is first and foremost the shattering of a particularly thick glass-ceiling. There are those who believe that crypto art is the biggest revolution to hit the art market in decades and with prices like that they may not be exaggerating. The sale makes the mild-mannered graphic designer among the top three most valuable living artists and puts his work in the list of the top 50 most expensive paintings ever sold at auction, in the same league as the likes of Vincent Van Gogh, Paul Cezanne, and Pablo Picasso. On Thursday, art history was made when a digital artwork named ‘EVERYDAYS: THE FIRST 5000 DAYS’ by crypto artist Beeple was sold on auction by Christie’s for a staggering $69,346,250, with the price climbing by $45,000,000 in the final moments of bidding. Alongside popular Instagram artists, a fair share of celebrities have sold their crypto masterpieces, including tech guru, billionaire Mark Cuban, ‘Rick and Morty’ co-creator Justin Roiland, YouTube sensation Logan Paul, and Linkin Park vocalist Mike Shinoda, who sells parts of his songs as NFTs. Since its birth roughly four years ago, the crypto art world has experienced a meteoric rise, reaching $250 million in sales in 2020 alone, four times what it made the prior year. ![]() In addition to the sales platforms that charge a commission, the artists also have a clear interest in selling their work on the platforms since unlike in traditional art, NFT sales are conducted through a smart contract which determines that the artists get a royalty payment every time the artwork is subsequently resold. There are currently 10 primary platforms for the sale of crypto art and they usually operate on the ‘drop’ method - an open auction that starts at a predetermined time and ends a short while later. The Token can be sold to the highest bidder, usually only in exchange for cryptocurrencies such as Ether. The token is essentially a line of code on the blockchain network that includes all the information about the artwork including its creator, and ownership history, akin to an artwork registry listing. How does it work? Just like when issuing a new coin, an artist can upload an image file on a blockchain platform and issue it as a Non-Fungible Token (NFT) or a “nifty” which is marked as being one of its kind and nontransferable. But hold on a minute, what is an original gif file? How can a file that was created on a computer, can be perfectly duplicated, and has been shared millions of times suddenly be recognized as an original work of art as if it was Leonardo de Vinci’s original Mona Lisa hanging in the Louvre? The answer is blockchain, the technology behind cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin, which has revolutionized the art world by allowing for the first time ever for a file of a digital artwork to be marked as an original and coded with the artist’s “signature,” granting it something that digital artists and art collectors have been long yearning for - commercial value. ![]()
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