What is NFT ART and why isn’t it “just a jpg?”
What is an NFT?
Why buy NFT art?
As a digital artist, I’ve been waiting for this forever.
It’s all based on ETH or ethereum. You pay with it, and you get paid with it. It is also what NFTs are… the “art” or files are saved , along with the record of your ownership, and all sales data / value, onto the block chain upon which ETH is based. That’s a 90% correct simplification.
Selling NFT art makes sense. I never considered my own art, which is digital, to be the same as a painting because I could only display / sell my computer drawn work in the form of prints or have the pieces published in a book or posted to Instagram.
Many “digital only” artists have been unable to participate in the gallery world and felt left out of the same consuderations of appreciation and value. Now, almost of of nowhere, NFT digital art is treated as valid as paintings are, and the tokenization of true ownership makes it “real”.
Added bonus: NFTs can make the artist money “forever” in royalties. If I sell a painting or a sculpture, the buyer can flip it for way more and I don’t get any of that. But with NFT art, the artist is paid a % of the sale every time automatically forever, every time it is resold. This % cut is determined at the point of first sale by the artist.
Also I love being paid for NFTs because I am paid in ETH (ethereum) which is the second most popular cryptocurrency after Bitcoin.. so my art sells for $100 but if I wait an hour or so, depending on the market, that $100 becomes $107 before I can even transfer it to dollars… so I don’t transfer it if I don’t need to… I can take a gamble on it increasing in value (which I’ve done… I’ve sold NFTs and I’m letting the money just sit there as ETH. … with some risk if it crashes and never comes back up.)
Why buy? If you have a favorite artist it would make sense to me right away. True ownership (not rights but of the piece itself) at the start of a new technology which has almost unlimited applications in the future? Count me in. Big time NFT art buyers are, in some cases, big winners in the ETH and Bitcoin investment world. They have a lot of ETH and invest in this Art. They bought into ETH at $10 and now it’s at $1780.00. So if they bought a half million “shares” or “coins” at $10… yeah. Now they have a lot more. Some popular crypto art raises in value immediately. And the currency upon which it is based and located on the block chain is fluctuating in value 24 hours a day.
You can also apply ETH to trading cards. The steeet fighter cards licensed via Capcom sold immediately and are gone… the prices went up as soon as they sold out. https://streetfighter.cards
As for the art, … for me, it’s a way to finally think of my digital art as “real”. The prices are, for us, the same as our art prices at say a Giant Robot show or some similar show. I sell jpg files and animated gifs for $100 to $350….but they are not “just jpgs” at all. They are the true expression of the medium I work in and are forever minted to the block chain with “true ownership” ( you can prove you purchased that toothpaste as long as you keep your receipt, but how can you tell if it is that exact tube of toothpaste? Especially if you buy many of the same kind….but NFTs show true ownership per each item or object, much like a deed to a home or pink slip/title for a car.)
As for the ecosystem… there are many “stores” where you can mint and sell NFTs. Some are invite only on the artist end.. you can post there if invited…. such as Foundation. Jeff Soto, a real painter and highly accomplished and loved artist, sells NFTs of his paintings for $3000 or so. Some more, some way more, and that price will go way up. James Jean sold one NFT piece on Foundation for $250k or so. The site is carefully curated and the artists on there seem to already be selling for a higher price than most. I’m on Open Sea… anybody can sell on there, as long as you can figure out how. Some artists have made a tremendous amount of money on there a such as the person who created Nyan Cat…sold one Nyan Cat gif for $500k Others sell their unknown doodles for $10 on open sea. My art goes for $100 — $350+ in the “real world”, so makes sense for me to be at that price. For now.
Nifty Gateway is the most widely known “store” and is the winner in brand and mindshare, because every single day everybody who is featured on there ends up making between 1 to $3 million. Almost always. I found it strange from the very beginning that a relatively unknown artist can make 2 million on one piece on Nifty Gateway but James Jean made $250,000, on Foundation…. Which is still a lot but why don’t the buyers on NiftyGateway jump over to foundation and spend the same amount? There’s probably an answer, I just don’t know it… The listings on Nifty Gateway bring in a million to each artist on there … so watching kids who were “unknown” (or at least not earning millions in real world gallery settings) suddenly become millionaires, attracts the attention of pretty much everybody… both consumers and other artists… “if that kid can make millions, I can too.” And the craze begins. Making millions “out of nowhere”, and the hope that you can too… brings attention.
There are very real “whales” or Wealthy collectors of NFT art who have done well in cryptocurrency or other financial sectors and want to invest. That’s very real. I used to assume based on my not knowing a thing about this, that perhaps this was manipulated or are the owners the buyers… but I am sure I was wrong.
The owners of nifty gateway are the Winklevoss twins, who are also tremendously invested in cryptocurrency in general, and own Gemini, the cryptocurrency sales and market service provider… So they own the store, the bank, and the money. Kind of. Which is ok by me. They took a massive risk in making this all happen. I love it.
My guess is perhaps, at least in my opinion and best guess, the Winklevoss mission seems to be: Change the culture to get people to use ETH to make purchases, and to collect / buy virtual goods… to get the art world to take digital art seriously, which trades on their system and uses a currency they are heavily invested in, normalize collecting of things as a NFTs such as trading cards or 3-D models perhaps to replace action figure collecting…. to make it a popular sales recordkeeping system for transactions….
Well how do you change culture? Music food and art. Starbucks got us to be ok with five dollars for coffee, which was always 50 cents or so at the diner… And now wealthy investors have taken note, see the value, and are competing with each other to obtain these pieces on the most popular website, and coincidentally the names are now increasing in notoriety… first it was a guy out of nowhere, then Ron English, Elon Musk’s girlfriend Grimes, Deadmau5, Steve Aoki… tribe leaders. Elon Musk, with perfect timing, announced major investments into cryptocurrency just weeks before Grimes made her move into the crypto NFT art world through nifty Gateway, which brought in 6 million.
Big brands will not want to miss out on this hype and their involvement will normalize the use of cryptocurrency and the technology on which this is all based even further. Does Hasbro have the Star Wars NFT license? Will Star Wars fans collect rotating 3-D models of each Star Wars character minted as NFTs? Adult collectibles are 25% of Hasbro’s business. The current Fanbase might not switch from buying real world objects to strictly virtual immediately, but my son… he is 8…he absolutely would. He is already obsessed with collecting ghosts on Lego’s Hidden Side app.
The Beeple 70 million sale put the story on the map at the intended time.. and they are taking the whole NFT art world to China later this year, with a show featuring the big names of Nifty Gateway…with IMO Perhaps The long-term goal not being to make money on art but to normalize using cryptocurrency within the culture and to engrain their avenues of retail and banking. It’s Starbucks, the Federal Reserve, the stock market and Amazon combined. I mean that in a good way, and I love the whole thing.
That’s NFTs… and if my son becomes an anime figure collector, he’s buying the NFT rotating 3D model , not the real world toy. That’s a done deal. Especially once Apple releases the glasses and gives us a new way to show them off… that’s the future.
I haven’t even touched possible future applications.
For me, it makes my digital art “real” and I can’t begin to tell you how that feels. The appreciation for each purchase is beyond way, way out there on the gratitude scale. If you’re happy, I’m happy x 100000.
See our work here? https://opensea.io/collection/sun-min-david-v3 Those aren’t just Jpgs… it’s our digital work finally becoming “real”… like Pinocchio?
NFT ART is new energy and a new way to connect, and I am sold on it. I love it. Finally artists can collect forever royalties if they wish. The other applications will blow our minds. I can’t wait to dig deeper. Maybe. IMO.
