The explosion of non-fungible token art has hit the stratosphere more swiftly and aggressively than even the most optimistic trumpeters of digital art were bold enough to predict.
The year has already been very good for NFTs with volume in the month of February handsomely eclipsing that of the entirety of 2020. Here are some figures: 2019: $465,885, 2020: $12.9MM, 2021 (just the OPENSEA marketplace) January: $8,040,094, February: $95,231,045, March 1-10: $34,065,492
Beeple, also known as Mike Winkelmann, crafts Sci-Fi, futuristic art. While sometimes whimsical or humorous, many do have societal, political, or egalitarian overtones that speak to his personal convictions.
While NFTs by prominent artists have largely shied away from controversial works, Beeple aggressively goes the other direction and unabashedly takes on institutions, political figures, and injustices with little fear of reprisal.
While some works leave little to the imagination in terms of the intended message, many leave interpretation up to the individual, allowing the viewer to extrapolate meaning through the kaleidoscope of their own experience.
As a long-time fan of fine art, I am pleased to see digital art fetching contemporary art prices. While Basquiat, Haring, Hirt, and Koons are titans of the contemporary movement and hugely important to their respective art periods, so too are other more modern artists that espouse many of the same beliefs and produce art that speak to these beliefs.
In 2019, Jeff Koons sold his "Rabbit" for $91.1 million. These amounts for a living contemporary artist are quite a lot, but are old hat when you see the years of contemporary art sales that routinely net billions annually.
The emerging collector sentiment is that NFTs exemplify the bleeding edge of technology and represent the true contemporary movement, utilizing the blockchain and digital artists tools to introduce artwork that can be held without storage or insurance costs, best feature the technology of the day, and embrace social media tools to bring in the eyeballs, building that notoriety and importance that ignites artworks appreciation down the road, the honeypot for collectors looking to 10x or 100x without the headache of visible volatility that would close out a traders position.
One can commission a work of art inexpensively and pay for visibility so why does one artist emerge with 9-figure NFT sale grosses and others flounder to sell works for 0.001 Ethereum? It speaks to the broader splash that an artist makes in the space. Everyone has a computer, and access to the blockchain, to create digital art just as everyone can use the English language to write a book, but it's the unique combination of thoughts, experiences, and personality that create a Beeple NFT or Dan Brown novel.
When I go to the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles and stand in front of a Jackson Pollock with a 9-figure valuation, a common reaction is a snide remark that their children could have splashed something together similar.
While one could have a nuanced discussion over how Benton, Picasso, and Miro influenced Pollock and how his "drip period" was transcendent for the Abstract Expressionist movement, with art critics like Clement Greenberg trumpeting "Jackson [as] the greatest painter this country had produced," this discussion is largely confined to academics in ivy towers, rigid art circles, or within the cloistered halls of family foundations.
By contrast, for Beeple's art, the appeal is essentially universal.
While many artists are painfully serious about their craft, the necessity of suffering for their art, and reach for industry buzzwords to create the appearance of being well-read, educated, or enlightened, manifesting in their purported seismic contribution to their art discipline, Beeple takes a much more gee-whiz, awe-shucks approach that speaks to his humility and proactively deflects the brilliance of his creations when directly questioned on the numbers that his NFTs are fetching.
It's for this reason that he is being so well-received, even by Reddit communities who are notoriously brutal towards artists or people whom they see as raking in a profit of any type. At $69,346,250, a profit and a half is being raked in, most assuredly.
The death of pretension and birth of innovation, that Mike Winkelmann's success and art personifies, is the best possible way to introduce digital art to the broader community.
While Bepple is, without a doubt, the figurehead and movement leader, there are also many thousands of digital artists whom are seeing exploding sales with collectors now slicing a portion of their investment account to include NFTs that resonate with their tastes and collecting thesis.
The brilliance of blockchain is the continual innovation always at work. Companies such as Masterworks.io have done an excellent job of tokenizing important works by contemporary artists with a liquid bulletin board secondary marketplace.
The future of this type of ERC20 wrapping of ERC721 digital art is explosive and in its infancy.
In my discussions with art investors, many would rather hold percentage piece of a hugely important work of original art over one of the 1,000 "limited edition" mintable ERC1155 works.
If you're looking at volume and dollar figures, even if scarcity adjusted, ERC721's still come away as the clear winner. Artists are best advised to mint single works utilizing the ERC721 token and focus on being prolific.
ERC1155 is a multi token standard and includes batch functionality (multiples), while ERC721's are uniquely single works of art.
Excited to what the rest of 2021 holds for NFTs, digital art, and blockchain art-specific innovation. I'm looking forward to cheering on more stories of artists whom are able to devote the rest of their lives to perfect their craft as life-changing amounts of capital get infused into their studios by virtue of their nimble decision to pivot into NFTs.
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