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Last week, Mike Winkelmann, the digital artist better known as Beeple, sold his piece “Everydays – The First 5000 Days” at auction for more than $ 69 million. This staggering sum made him the third best-selling living artist of all time, behind Jeff Koons and David Hockney.
The sale was remarkable 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. Specifically, the buyer, known only as MetaKovan, did not receive a physical copy of the part. Instead, they were given a media file of several hundred megabytes and an NFT – or non-fungible token, a blockchain-backed contract stating that they own the original digital copy.
There was a lot of spinning to be done. Is there any real value in NFTs or was it all 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 about this young market.
The Beeple composite that sold for $ 69.3 million. (Christie’s / TNS)
Christie’s / TNSFar from all the internet headlines, however, the Bay Area artists and designers – many of whom had been working in the digital token space for months or years before “NFT” became a little understood domestic expression. – did not seem bothered by the latest media hype cycle (even if it drives up the cost of the NFT strike). Instead, they focused on what they see as new futures in form, both financially and artistically. As an artist from San Francisco, Göksu Ilgaz Koçakcıgil (aka @skywaterr), he says: “When I realized that I could make money with my own digital art, I was completely blown away. I felt 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’ve literally never had an interview in two years,” he said. He ended up driving for Postmates and Caviar to earn rent. Then last summer he started hearing about NFT technology. He decided to try and strike his own work.
It took months of trial and error, but on February 6, it finally made its first sale. The coin, “Enter the Chain,” a looping video of a spiral parking lot with an MC Escher feel, opted for .385 Ether, the currency backed by the Ethereum blockchain – something like $ 640 at the time. . It was the first time he had sold a work of his art. He has since sold three other pieces. Two of which went for an Ethereum each – around $ 1,500 per pop.
“Enter the Channel” by PixelActivist
Courtesy of Corbin Bell“It’s a way of doing what you really love. There is no compromise, ”says Bell. In no time, NFTs have become a path to financial stability for him and other artists he knows. “It just paves a way for the fringe, as corny as it sounds.”
When Bell speaks in a new way for the marginalized, he’s not just talking about money. There is also the feeling that this new technology can support communities. Danny jones, a self-taught graphic designer from San Francisco who also goes through Yasly, sold his first NFT, “Super Wild,” on February 18, a day after putting it on sale, for 1.99 Ether (or about $ 3,900 at the time). The play is a soothing, looping video of flowers frozen in a translucent rainbow block that spins forever.
Jones took that money and other income from NFT sales and reinvested it in other artists. “I just bought an NFT from my friend… I won (their) auction and was able to support her in a tangible way. Money is definitely not the only motivator for me.
Strictly speaking, non-fungible tokens are not new; they have been around, in one form or another, for about six years.
They are backed by the same type of blockchain technology that supports various cryptocurrencies. In this case, Ethereum is the currency of choice. But unlike the individual ether, which are interchangeable with each other, NFTs are one of a kind. Essentially, artists can participate in an exchange, ‘mint’ their artwork like an NFT, and auction it off. (Sometimes they’ll include a physical copy with the sale as well.) Right now, most NFTs are turning to the visual arts, but it’s just as possible to mint certificates for digital trading cards, scrapbooks. music, video games, even experiments. Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey signed and then sold the first tweet he has ever tweeted.
After rising steadily in popularity last year – Beeple’s first sale, for $ 6,666.66, was in October – the technology came into the mainstream last month. This is when celebrity culture came into the picture. Musician Grimes sold NFT for $ 6 million. The classic Nyan Cat meme – a cat with a poptart body, propelled into space by a rainbow exhaust – sold for just under $ 600,000.
Bell and Jones have both listed their work on Foundation, an invitation-only NFT listing site popular with Bay Area artists. Kayvon Tehranian, the site’s CEO, said the Foundation launched with 50 artists in February, after doing a year of closed experimentation with NFTs, and now lists thousands of artists. “I could give you a figure and that figure will be massively exceeded tomorrow.”
Mixed media artist Göksu Ilgaz Koçakcigill, also known as @skywaterr, looks through a stack of her work in her studio on Friday, March 12, 2021 in San Francisco, California.
Lea Suzuki / The ChronicleThe current attention boom, Tehranian says, is undoubtedly part of the usual cycle of internet hype, but that doesn’t mean NFTs are a short-lived trend. “You have artists who completely reorient their practices around this technology.” He describes NFTs as a “new layer” for the Internet, one that has the potential to fundamentally change the way things work. “People find it hard to see this because … exponential growth is very difficult to understand.”
Barry Threw, executive director of Gray Area, Mission District’s arts and tech space, spoke about the transformational potential of blockchain in similar terms. “We’re in the CompuServe era of this stuff. For example, we haven’t even been to AOL or MySpace or, you know, even Facebook in terms of bloodlines, how technology develops.
For now, however, Threw describes it in layman’s terms: “It’s an asset bubble, it’s a hype bubble and it gives artists the opportunity to have some traction. … (But) it’s a market that’s just as interested in buying memes as it is buying art.
Traditional art institutions also keep their eyes on form. Representatives from YBCA and art museums said they don’t plan to start collecting NFTs, but they are observing how artists are using the space.
A thrilling pink abstraction in a fast-selling endless loop.
Courtesy of Göksu Ilgaz Koçakcigil /Three years ago, as Koçakcıgil worked his way through a Visual Communication Design degree at San Francisco State, she looked around and “saw all this amazing digital work that no one was paying for. »And imagined, one day, to open an art gallery, a real physical place with works of art on display.
Until recently, it looked 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 crypto art communities and discovered NFTs, a paradigm-shifting discovery.
In January, she made her first work supported by NFT, and earlier this month she unveiled a new collection on Foundation which 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 thrilling pink abstraction that moves in an endless loop on a black screen.
It sold on March 6 for 0.169 Ether – or roughly $ 310.
Ryan Kost is a writer for the San Francisco Chronicle. Email: [email protected] Twitter: @RyanKost
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