Like traditional art, digital art has its own galleries, online and with peer-to-peer structure. On Ethereum, the biggest are SuperRare, for single edition works, KnownOrigin, for multiples, and Async.art, for programmable art with shared ownership. Another key marketplace is OpenSea, with a greater variety of collectibles.
Through these galleries' smart contracts, which regulate NFT and cryptocurrency transactions between artists' and collectors' wallets, the blockchain has also solved a major problem in traditional art, related to the management of royalties in the secondary market.
For those who don't know, in the art market there is the primary market and the secondary market.
The primary market refers to art that comes directly from the artist and is offered for sale the first time. The secondary market instead concerns the resale, purchase, sale and exchange between collectors, gallery owners and museums.
While auction houses normally exclude artists from remuneration on secondary sales, there is now a new standard: on various digital art platforms when a work is bought again, the author himself receives a remuneration of 10% of the new sale price.
The secondary market phenomenon involves artists, collectors and curators.
In two years on SuperRare, the Hackatao artist duo has sold twenty-three crypto works on the secondary market. One of their GIFs, which sold for 1.5Ether ($450) in 2018, was repurchased to the tune of 45Ether ($9,019). By now, the duo has an amazing success story behind them.
Jason Bailey, curator and founder of Artnome, had purchased AI Generated Portrait Nude #1 by Robbie Barrat in 2018 for about $80 (0.46Ether at the time) and recently sold the work for over $12,000 (75Ether). The nearly $5,000 from the sale of Lockup, which he purchased two years ago from XCOPY for only $71, he instead donated to support SuperRare artists.
One of the most unique aspects of crypto art is its community. It is a concrete space where an artist, trained or not, can experiment and confront himself on an international level, between technology, creativity and traditional techniques.
The key word of the community is collaboration, there is great mutual support in the search for the personal union between technique, message, stylistic figure, social activity and self-promotion. This spirit is supported by the exclusive concentration on art: artists often remain anonymous or use pseudonyms; gender, ethnicity, social status simply disappears.
From a cultural point of view, crypto art essentially represents a manifestation of current living. Even the world of gaming - and its market - is increasingly linked to that of crypto art, a genre at the intersection of artistic creation and digital interaction. This current, while remaining inclusive, reflects the spirit of the new generations that are going to shape our tomorrow.