Paintings by Florentine artist Masaccio in 1425 are considered the first important examples of a one-point perspective. What artists could accomplish from then on was completely altered.
At a demonstration in Paris in 1839, Louis-Jacques Mandé Daguerre showed off his new photography technology. Museum walls haven't been the same since the introduction of this technology.
An NFT digital certificate that was included with a $69 million college of computer graphics sold by Mike Winkelmann under his nom d'artiste Beeple on March 11, 2021, exactly one year ago. Founded by John Legend and Our Happy Company in February 2022, OurSong is an NFT platform. When it comes to creating exclusive digital covers and getting access to exclusive audio clips, OurSong is touted as a "social commerce platform." Creatives from many walks of life—illustrators, musicians, and photographers, as well as some well-known avant-garde artists—rushed to join the NFT gold rush.
Six million NFTs, generally granted to authenticate digital products but occasionally real artifacts like paintings and sculptures, have cost around $44 billion in the last year. Brands, marketers, influencers, and anyone else on social media who wants to monetize and sell their own content should consider adopting NFTs.
NFT skeptics are just as contemptuous, if not more so. "How can this possibly be art?" is actually a way of expressing that the collectors buying NTF of Bored Apes and other digital paintings traded in the cryptocurrency have warped values, crazed speculation, and worst of all, terrible taste. Markets continue to grow in both size and irrationality. While there are some encouraging trends in the fine art market, there are also some serious warning signs.
Even if "NFT art" has flooded our culture, has there been an actual shift in the way art is perceived, understood, or defined? The reason is that "NFT art" doesn't exist, therefore such a shift may be difficult.
As the name suggests, NFTs are digital certificates that can be attached to anything, even a shoe or newspaper article, and cannot be altered or lost because they are stored on the blockchain. Using smart contracts, NFTs are minted, assigning ownership and managing transferability.
To put it another way, you may think of an NFT as the deed to a house: As long as it explains who owns it and maybe a few other details, "deeded house" isn't something you'd ever refer to as a distinct type of home. The same is true for "NFT art" and "art" that is only "art."
An NFT is a digital asset that can include everything from music to video, even a boat. Digital files such as JPEG images or MP4 video clips are typically NFT'd since they are stored on a hard disk and appear or sound just like they did before NFTs were invented. NFT "certificates," like the autobiographical animations of the transgender youngster known as Fewocious, would be just as good or horrible, depending on your tastes, if they hadn't been "certified."
As if there had never been anything fundamentally NFT-ish about Beeple's work from the start, the artist is exhibiting prints, drawings, and paintings at Jack Hanley in New York, his first gallery show. On the blockchain, the Hanley items will be NFT'd and sold.
In the event that a hacker is successful in eradicating all NFTs, 99.9% of the "certified" creations will not be affected. We'll get to the rest of them later. Because that's the exciting and crucial part of this story: the few NFTs that may lead to new art.
As a media-arts curator at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Rudolf Frieling completely endorses the declaration that there is no NFT art—that art or digital art exists." Frieling's museum has been a pioneer in collecting digital art of all kinds, from webpages to 3-D-printed sculptures. As Frieling put it, "the concept that you could have a 'NFT art display' is frankly, ludicrous.
When it comes to selling NFT "deeds," Sotheby's auction house specialist Michael Bouhanna has a leg up on the competition. It is his belief that soon enough, once the novelty of the NFTs wears off, the conversation will shift to "digital art" rather than mentioning the NFT at all.
NFTs were developed for commercial purposes rather than aesthetic ones. In 2014, experienced digital artist Kevin McCoy and a technologist named Anil Dash created what is largely regarded as the first NFT at a tech-friendly art-a-thon at the New Museum in New York. (Although it hadn't yet been called that way.)
I recently visited McCoy, 55, and his wife Jennifer, 53, in their newly remodeled Greenpoint, Brooklyn, home to catch up on life and art. That's when he and his buddies started making digital masterpieces and selling them online, and McCoy was trying to figure out how to legally claim ownership of those works. If artists want their ideas to be widely disseminated, they should make sure that their digital files, such as videos or JPEGs like those generated by Beeple, can be easily and perfectly replicated.
We needed a technique to differentiate a handful of these duplicates from the rest so that they could be considered "genuine." It dawned on McCoy that blockchain technology could serve as a form of a digital vault. Put the deed to a digital artwork in the vault as an NFT, and the art collectors have a tangible asset to hold and trade.
According to the McCoy family, digital artists will be able to sell their work with the same ease as traditional artists because Kevin invented the new token. In Jennifer's opinion, "you might truly feel like you had free space to think. "
The McCoys have finally reaped the benefits of their eight-year-old plan. Kevin's first NFT sold for $1.4 million at Sotheby's in June of last year, attached to a modest digital abstraction titled "Quantum."
No One Is Making a Dime Despite All the Hype
NFTs, on the other hand, isn't helping the majority of artists. According to Ethan McMahon of analytics firm Chainalysis, nearly half of all NFTs that sell go for less than $400 - a pittance that doesn't even pay the blockchain fees when a creator "mints" NFTs, much less the costs of sustaining a digital studio. In addition, there are an untold number of NFTs that do not sell at all.
According to McMahon, the vast majority of NFTs are never resold, which means that the upper end of the nft marketplace is where the real money is to be found. If you're attempting to profit from the NFT hoopla, "you really need to be careful," McMahon advised. Why? "Because it often ends up being your disadvantage."
NFTs as a source of inspiration for artists
Amy Whitaker, a professor of art-world economics at New York University, says that "art exists in a world where one is always making political choices about one's relationship to economics." As a result of how NFTs have been bought, traded, and loved, questions about ownership and its significance have arisen. There are questions of charity and greed involved, given that NFTed photographs are meant to be freely shared (in that they are mostly bought to make the cryptorich richer). Creating an NFT can be a collective effort, but there are also considerations of individualism, such as who gets the money for a particular innovation, in play. Social "incidentals" like these take center stage in NFTs, Whitaker added, whereas traditional art can be seen in beautiful aesthetic isolation.
Converting physical art to NFT or transferring NFT to physical, which is up to the individual creator to decide. However, there are a few fundamentals to keep in mind when it comes to displaying the art. The most important thing is to determine what you want to show your collectors.
