We begin to introduce the topic by explaining that one of the most famous animated gifs in the world, that of the rainbow kitten flying in a starry sky, was sold at auction for 300 Ethereum, which corresponds to about 590 thousand dollars. But how does the crypto art market work?
Let's find out in this chapter.
Created by Chris Torres in 2011, the Nyan Cat - originally called Pop-Tart Cat - is one of the most loved, shared and remixed animated gifs ever. Ten years after its birth, this digital object has been associated with a NFT (Non Fungible Token) and sold at auction for 300 Ethereum, equivalent to about 590 thousand dollars.
The news is making a big fuss, the subject is also covered by the New York Times and the question everyone is asking is: how do you buy - and then to own - a meme that everyone can see on YouTube for ten years now?
Legitimate question, of course, to be asked as the rumors continue to mount around this strange phenomenon. Then it turns out that meme was not an isolated case. A few days later, a clip of a LeBron James dunk is sold for $208,000. And then all hell broke loose! The historic Christie's auction house sniffs out the deal and starts exhibiting NFT of digital art. A work (or rather: a large package of works) by Beeple sold for $70 million. To give you an idea, only two works by living artists (Jeff Koons and David Hockney) have fetched higher prices. To give you another example, in 2014 one of Monet's famous Water Lilies sold for $54 million, $15 less than Beeple.
What's going on? Are we in the midst of classic speculative bubble hysteria, or are we at the beginning of a new era and missing out on something important? Making a judgment now is very premature. In the meantime, always to give an overview of what is happening, the youtuber Logan Paul is selling for 20 thousand dollars each the videos of the most important moments of his Pokémon games, and Mark Cuban (entrepreneur and owner of the Dallas Mavericks) has sold one of his tweets for $ 952. The idea was also liked by Jack Dorsey, founder of Twitter, but instead of selling a random tweet has auctioned off the first tweet ever (which of course is his own). At the moment, someone is willing to spend $2.5 million just to get the ownership of this tweet.
The growth of NFT turnover reflects the excitement of the last few months. According to the Crypto.art portal (which aggregates the best-known NFT resale sites, but not all of them), in November 2020 sales of nft-based art had reached the value of about $1.5 million. By January 2021, they had surpassed $10 million, and by March they had already hit $120 million. The increase is by no means insignificant and the crypto art phenomenon is definitely one to be followed very carefully and closely. The frenzy, the irrational spending and the exponential growth of the turnover all confirm unequivocally how there is really a lot of attention around the emerging phenomenon of crypto art and that surely someone is really making stratospheric gains.
There is a shift from a real verse to a digital version of the artwork, through the use of computers. In art there was already a shift to rewarding the idea more than the craftsmanship. Already with Andy Warhol in primis, with his Factory, there was a team of people who worked for him and he put only the idea. Even Jeff Koons' sculptures are not made by himself, but by specialized artisans. Koons only creates the artistic project, but collectors have no problem at all from this point of view to buy his works at astronomical figures. The idea of technique, of manual skill, of the gesture of the brushstroke, the perspectives and the play of light of masters such as Caravaggio or Leonardo da Vinci, are outdated concepts and no longer so important in the art market today. Even the idea that the work of art should be something material has already been surpassed throughout the history of art with the famous performances of artists such as Marina Abramovic. With crypto art, a further step is taken. Beyond a fully digitized work, even its ownership itself is tied to something digitized.
A cryptographic token that is associated with a digital image and, once purchased, acts as a certificate of ownership. In some ways, NFT is both extremely concrete and completely immaterial. Crucially, the NFT does not lock down the digital image itself, which can continue to circulate, reproduce and transform, as in the case of the Nyan Cat, nor does it lock down its physical variant, which can be placed on a secondary market.
NFTs thus clothe a digital creation with all the rights it would physically have as a work of art: uniqueness/rarity, authenticity, ownership. In this new guise, crypto works are legitimized to persuade collectors, and they do. Not surprisingly, Christie's first auction of a completely immaterial work has already been held. The work in question is Everydays, by artist and graphic designer Beeple (Mike Winkelmann). Everydays is a project that collects in its archive one image per day produced by the artist, who declares: "These pictures are all done from start to finish every day. The purpose of this project is to help me get better at different things". To date, Everydays is composed of 5048 images, of which the first 5000 will be auctioned by Christie's, who decided to collect them in a single digital collage, making this multitude a unique piece. The auction started from the symbolic figure of 100 dollars, but the atmosphere immediately heated up. It is now known then how it turned out. The auction ended with the record amount of over $69 million!!!
In recent years, crypto art has attracted several collectors and investors from all over the world, without ever entering the "traditional" market circuit of the big auction houses like Christie's. This new intrusion could mark a new legitimacy of digital works in the recognized art market, generating repercussions in the system, in the conception and in the displays of art itself.