A brief look into NFT’s and the world of Digital Art
Studio Manager David gives a short introduction to NFT’s.
I truly love all things design, from a magazine ad with a funky office chair to Vincent van Gogh’s, The Starry Night painted in 1889. But don’t get any ideas, I’m no art critic. I like what I like, it’s as simple as that.
Bored Ape Yacht Club
Recently I wandered into the estranged world of NFT’s (non-fungible token), just a short trip on the digital express way into the unknown workings of crypto currency and digital art auctions. As it the norm in these situations, ‘it was a friend’ who first introduced me to NFT’s. They had been heavily into crypto at this time and making a good living in doing so. If I’m honest, playing the crypto market’s not for me, I prefer a more solid investment with less risk involved.
“You’re into design, right?” was their message on Whatsapp, because people now see instant messaging as the world’s main form of communication, not sure what’s wrong with calling people and having an actual full conversation, you know, one that doesn’t take 20, painstakingly written texts over what can sometimes be a few days...I miss the good old days before instant messaging. After this long communication, I’d learnt a little and wanted to know more so did some research.
Robyn Conti, Contributor for forbes.com described an NFT as: “a digital asset that represents real-world objects like art, music, in-game items and videos. They are bought and sold online, frequently with cryptocurrency, and they are generally encoded with the same underlying software as many cryptos.”
I then checked out some of the digital art currently being auctioned online and was staggered to see some of the figure’s pieces were being auctioned for, even more so what they looked like! But remember I’m no art critic. For example, the Bored Ape Yacht Club, said to be one of the most prestigious NFT collections in the world is a collection of 10,000 NFTs, each depicting an ape with different traits and visual attributes. “The fact that you can authenticate a digital asset, that’s revolutionary. That changes the game entirely,” Seneca,
27-year-old Asian-American and one of the illustrators of the Bored Ape Yacht Club project said, adding that NFTs will give digital art a seat at the table in the traditional art market. To put this into scale, back in September 2021, a bundle of 101 NFTs from Bored Ape Yacht Club sold at Sotheby’s for $24.4 million.
Some of the current famous owners being Jimmy Fallon, Steph Curry and Post Malone. I love these Apes, they are incredibly unique, the designs are far out there and dam right crazy, and some would say to the point of being disturbing, but they are brilliant.
The First 5,000 Days NFT
Another digital artist that has made a huge splash in the NFT market is Beeple, with The First 5,000 Days NFT resulting in an unprecedented $69.3 million sale at Christie’s in early 2021. Which comprises of 5,000 images that the artist, a graphic designer based in North Carolina, made over 13 years. As the internet reacted to the record price, Beeple weighed in on the result via Twitter, writing, “holy f*!k.”
At first the traditional auction houses were reluctant to get involved in the selling of NFT’s, but this has taken a massive shift over the past few years. With Sotheby’s selling $65 million of NFTs in 2021, while arch-rival Christie’s has sold more than $100 million of the new type of crypto asset. “Everybody wants to sell an NFT,” said Cassandra Hatton, Sotheby’s global head of science and popular culture. “My inbox is just absolutely clogged.”
Will this shift in the value of digital art become common or is this just another blockchain fad? Only time will tell but based on how the markets have reacted over the past 2 years, it does not look that way.
One real benefit for us lovers of design is that with the decline of print media, in the 30 years from 1990 to 2020, weekday newspaper circulation has dropped from 63.2 million to 24.3 million and the continuous increase in internet adoption, over 12½ trillion hours are now spent online per year, we will hopefully be exposed to an array of interesting digital art from artists all over the word.
