NFT Art digital fashion that is gaining millions of creators

LONDON (AP): A piece of digital art, modified with cryptocurrency technology to make it unique, was sold at auction this week for about $ 70 million. This transaction generated worldwide headlines and grew the growing interest in this type of digital objects (known as non-expendable tokens or NFTs) that have caught the attention of artists and collectors.

In economic jargon, a fungible testimony is an asset that can be exchanged individually. Think of dollars or bitcoins – each has the same value and can be traded freely. A non-expendable object, on the other hand, has a value of its own, like an old house or a classic car.

Cross this notion with the cryptocurrency technology known as blockchain and you will get NFT. These are, in fact, digital certificates of authenticity that can be attached to digital art or, almost, almost anything else that comes out digitally: audio files, video clips, animated stickers, this article you are reading.

NFTs confirm ownership of an article by recording the details in a digital book known as a blockchain, which is public and stored on Internet computers, making it effectively impossible to lose or destroy.

For now, these tokens are very hot in the collector’s world, where they are used to solve a central problem of digital collectibles: how to claim ownership of something that can be easily and endlessly duplicated.

YOU DON’T GET IT YET. CAN’T SOMEONE COPY DIGITAL THINGS ON THE INTERNET?

Of course, anyone can download a copy of Beeple’s art from their social media channel, print it, and hang it on the wall. Just like you can take a picture of the Mona Lisa at the Louvre or buy a print at the museum’s gift shop. But that doesn’t mean you have these original works of art.

One of the purposes of NFTs is that they can be used to track the digital origin of an object, allowing some selected ones to prove ownership. In the big picture, it’s a way to create scarcity, albeit artificial, so you can sell something at higher prices thanks to its scarcity.

“All the time, money, and effort you put into your digital life can create value for that,” said Andrew Steinwold, a Chicago fund manager who started an NFT fund in 2019. “You have rights to property in the physical world. Why don’t we have property rights in the digital world? “

Some NFT issuers grant full copyrights to the buyer, while others do not.

Beeple is an American digital artist based in South Carolina, his real name is Mike Winkelmann. For 13 years he has been creating digital sketches with 3D tools daily. Christie’s, an auction house, calls his work “abstract, fantastic, grotesque or absurd.” It has 1.9 million followers on Instagram.

In December, the first extensive auction of his art brought in $ 3.5 million, an attractive amount that was surpassed by this week’s huge sale of his collage “Everyday: The First 5,000 Days” for nearly 70 million dollars, paid in digital currency known as Ethereum.

THEN WHO SELLS NFT?

William Shatner, of “Star Trek” fame, last year sold 90,000 virtual trading cards for $ 1 each. Electronic music Grimes sold its digital art worth $ 6 million last month, including a video clip of winged cherubs floating in pastel dreamy landscapes costing $ 389,000. Clips from NBA star LeBron James are selling for up to $ 225,000. Actress Lindsey Lohan sold a picture of her face. You can also buy virtual terrain in video games and meme characters like Nyan Cat.

Digital artist Anne Spalter started out as an NFT skeptic, but has now sold several works of art using tokens. The latest was a video called “Dark Castles,” of mysteriously distorted castles generated by artificial intelligence technology, which sold for $ 2,752.

“The NFTs have opened up art to a lot of people who would never have gone to a gallery in New York,” said Spalter, who pioneered digital fine arts courses at Brown University and Rhode Island School. of Design in the 1990s. “They’re investors, they’re technology entrepreneurs. They’re in this world.”

WHO WOULD SPEND $ 70 MILLION IN ONE?

On Friday, Christie’s identified the buyer of Beeple’s work as the financier of a digital art fund that goes by the pseudonym Metakovan, an ad that could fuel the concerns of a bubble in the cryptocurrency art market . The buyer founded Metapurse, described as the largest NFT fund in the world, which will likely benefit from the most attention.

The British auction house said the purchase makes Beeple’s work the third most valuable work of art ever sold by a living artist, behind the works of Jeff Koons and David Hockney.

Spalter said he expects this bubble to appear, though he still believes NFTs are promising for artists as a way to reduce fraud and misappropriation of works.

“I’m still baffled by the prices and the level they have,” he said. “I think there will be a correction.”