Crypto art?
grand marshal polycounter
Have anyone heard about this? I have just discovered it a few days ago, by seeing some artists posting about their sellings on crypto art auctions and marketplaces. Took me a while to understand why people pays thousands of dollars for a gif but now I get it. I believe this whole thing is fairly recent, or at least it just starts to get to some extremes. For example, there is the artist "beeple". Check out his stuff on artstation, it worth it! Recently he made 3.5m $ by selling copies of his art this way. Since then I found 2-3 websites that can be used for this. Some of them are auction based, some of them are more like regular marketplaces, some of them accepts real money, some of them accepts crypto money. Any thoughts or experience with the topic?
Replies
Moving this to Career & Education, seeing as how it's to do with learning how to sell.
Now I totally understand that people would think like what the fuck is this, but if we simplify it, its like what I said in my previous post, but in a modern form that takes advantage ot technology. I am not an expert in the topic, but it does look like something that we need to keep an eye on and I would highly encourage you to check out how much some pieces makes. This way of selling pieces of art is something new.
https://niftygateway.com/collections
Not sure if you are seeing my new posts after the move @Eric Chadwick . Not saying to move it back but I think its not what you thought it is, and I think it worth a discussion because this is way better than the usual ways. Its also something that just came to be recently. It is indeed about selling stuff, but not like how we are used to sell.
I do believe that artists needs to know about this whole thing because it just made it possible to make money from your digital art in a traditional way in a sense that people can buy it. Which was not really possible in the past, unless you sold prints or some other physical form. I mean. It would be a shame if people missed the opportunity only because they didnt know that this is possible.
Only time will tell if this works or doesn't.
https://niftygateway.com/itemdetail/primary/0x4e6c7f87d1e08a88a2031bf61d5352b60498a8ce/1
The story continues with Justion Roiland who is the "Co-creator and voice of rick and morty"
https://twitter.com/JustinRoiland
He will have a drop on nifty with these 3... Whatever these are:
https://twitter.com/niftygateway/status/13502463914032087
Until October, the most Mike Winkelmann — the digital artist known as Beeple — had ever sold a print for was $100.
Today, an NFT of his work sold for $69 million at Christie’s. The sale positions him “among the top three most valuable living artists,” according to the auction house.
The record-smashing NFT sale comes after months of increasingly valuable auctions. In October, Winkelmann sold his first series of NFTs, with a pair going for $66,666.66 each. In December, he sold a series of works for $3.5 million total. And last month, one of the NFTs that originally sold for $66,666.66 was resold for $6.6 million.
NFTs, or non-fungible tokens, are unique files that live on a blockchain and are able to verify ownership of a work of digital art. Buyers typically get limited rights to display the digital artwork they represent, but in many ways, they’re just buying bragging rights and an asset they may be able to resell later. The technology has absolutely exploded over the past few weeks — and Winkelmann, more than anyone else, has been at the forefront of its rapid rise.
“He showed us this collage, and that was my eureka moment when I knew this was going to be extremely important,” Noah Davis, a specialist in post-war and contemporary art at Christie’s, told The Verge. “It was just so monumental and so indicative of what NFTs can do.”
It isn't environment friendly at all.
Good way to burn the planet and ruin our future though.
https://joanielemercier.com/the-problem-of-cryptoart/
Crypto energy consumption is way higher than anything we do daily on the internet. Mining it is designed to burn energy the size of whole countries.
Also do you need to be a good artist, or rather an artist to get into crypto art?
A lot of it the success stories seem to be connected to already popular artists, even if their art is shit (like Grimes)
Also you need to front 'gas money' to get your art dropped, then the ethereum behind it is speculated usually after some one bids and the artist gets a percentage in crypto.
So basically a pyramid scheme.
When that is speculated and converted only then do you get any dollars.
So basically its like gambling chips, there is no intrinsic value in the art whatsoever.
Also I noticed that a lot of the buyers were the same account across multiple artists, many times connected to the very marketplaces that were hosting the art.
So basically an investor investing his own money into art he hosts to raise the value of the marketplace. And there is no way to know if artists that put their art aren't doing the same thing. Its completely unregulated.
I mean as long as it pays the artist, but the environmental impact sure is considerable.
Kinda like attaching ones art to packaging for blood diamonds.
https://kotaku.com/crypto-art-belongs-in-the-trash-1846444119
There's also the matter of art theft and copyright
https://io9.gizmodo.com/dc-comics-tells-artists-to-stay-out-of-nft-business-or-1846466427
now the real kicker here is, it was bought by an NFT company... don't get me wrong it's absolutely great for beeple, but i doubt it was ever about the art, maybe a bit about the artist. It was always just to lure more folks into the space.
As far as I know, one paying for NFT actually buys a certificate that they now own that piece of art. That's what the price comes from. Anyone can download a gif or a crappy jpg made in paint, but they can't prove that they own that piece without the digital certificate.