Nfts
As the winner of the renowned ABS Digital Art Prize is announced, have we reached a turning point in the conversations around NFTs and culture?
The artist of French origin and based in Geneva RVig (full name Richard Vigniel) won the ABS Digital Art Prize 2024 for his work of generative art Fleurs Du Malwhich is inspired by the famous collection of poetry of the same name by Charles Beaudalaire from 1857.
The prize, sponsored by Arab Bank Switzerland (ABS) and formerly known as the ABS NFT Art Prize, focuses on digital art created by artists who have worked with non-fungible tokens (NFTs) – digital certificates. Programmable authenticity tags that sit on the blockchain, allowing artists to both showcase their work to a global audience and sell directly to collectors, via cryptocurrencies such as Ethereum. The prize was awarded on May 28 during the third edition Non-fungible conferencing (NFC)in Lisbon.
Vigniel is a generative artist, using creative coding to create digital artwork since 1999 and has been working with NFTs for three years. He describes the video work Fleurs Du Mal as “embodying Baudelaire’s 126 poems as ribbons that evolve and flow according to the structure of the poetry.”
He continues: “A visual space is created where the ribbons intertwine and blend, reflecting the structure of the text. The result is a dance between the individual poems…with each ribbon moving independently, driven solely by the shape and construction of the words. The work is offered in several formats, which is characteristic of the NFT space in 2024. It is a three-minute looping video; five 10-minute videos, tokenized (or created) via five individual NFTs; five high-resolution images in unique editions; a high-resolution image tokenized via NFT in a limited edition; and a limited edition high-resolution print.
The decision to reposition the prize as a “Digital Art Prize” rather than an “NFT Art Prize” is important to Vigniel and to the judges, who include Rani Jabban, managing director of Arab Bank Switzerland, and four star digital artists. These artists are Claire Argenta collaborative artificial intelligence artist whose motto is “taste is the new skill”; Dave Krugmanphotographer and founder of the ALLSHIPS creative community; William Mapan, a leading generative artist known for his long-form works; And Marjan Moghaddama long-established crypto artist and winner of the 2023 ABS NFT Art Prize.
In Vigniel, Jabban and Krugmanphotographer and founder of ALL SHIPS creative community, the name change is important to communicate to the wider art world what NFTs are – a technology that serves to certify, surface and “tokenize” digital art in a way that brings artists and collectors – while clarifying that they are not a form of art in themselves.
The name of the prize also changes we have the impression of being part of the maturation of a sphere which was dominated three years ago by sensational headlines about the high prices of digital artworks: the Artist Beeple’s Everyday: The First 5000 Days (2021) sold for $69.3 million, which used an NFT, at Christie’s in March 2021; and artist Pak’s Merge, which saw 28,983 buyers create NFTs on the Nifty Giftway platform for a combined total of $91.8 million as of December 2021, among those who caused a sensation. This has often given rise to many other areas of digital art worth exploring further, such as the proof of work, artistic concept and process, and new ownership models that NFTS has enabled in these groundbreaking projectsbeing neglected.
“It’s just a technology, in the same way that a computer is a technology or a canvas is a form of technology,” Krugman told the Art Newspaper, referring to the NFT. “In the big craze or NFT bubble of 2021, a lot of the news and media coverage of the space has become very sensationalist and I think [NFTs were] misinterpreted in many ways… Non-fungible tokens and blockchain are just the underlying technology. All it does is [surface and certify] digital objects. What artists do with these digital objects is something else entirely. And change the name [of the prize] digital art is a recognition of this.
“Every time I hear someone say NFT art, I say no, that’s not NFT art. It’s not crypto art, adds Vigniel, speaking to The Art Newspaper, “An NFT is a “certificate of authenticity, of ownership, that you can resell or not.” The ownership story captured in that certificate, in the NFT, he says, is “important to the traditional art world.” Having the reliability of a piece from its origin, from me, from the artist… to this collector and then that one. It’s part of the story of each piece.
The breadth and depth of the digital art space
For Jabban, who launched the price in 2023, the price and its evolution are part of a personal journey in the NFT space. After the big events of 2021, he felt that the growing interest in these products was nothing more than a speculative bubble, but changed his mind after meeting John Karp, who founded the Non-Fungible Conference in 2022. Thanks to this meeting, Jabban “discovered the full extent of the problem”. and the depth of space [of digital art that NFTs enable]”. “NFT is just a medium, it’s like an MP3 for music,” explains Jabban. “So we’re talking about art, and that’s what’s important. You see Richard Vigniel, who has already been working in generative art for 25 years. The NFT gave it visibility and a media capable of selling and reaching a wider audience than before. But it is also important to note that these artists were there before.”
Les Fleurs du Mal de Vigniel are available in multiple formats: a three-minute looping video; five 10-minute videos, tokenized (or created) via five individual NFTs; five high-resolution images in unique editions; a high-resolution image tokenized via NFT in a limited edition; and a limited edition high-resolution print Courtesy of the artist
Vigniel quotes Art blocks as a particular platform that enabled “a new type of long-form generative art.” NFT and blockchain technology in general, he says, has – as a trusted source of provenance – allowed artists to create “a series of unique pieces, a collection of 100 or 1,000 unique pieces, all different, all generated with the same algorithm.
Considering the work of Vigniel and the other nine shortlisted artists— Léandre Herzog; MDD; Ivona Tau; Samantha Cavet and Eva Eller; Louis Paul Caron; Mia Forrest; Roope Rainisto and Irina Angles; Anthony Samaniego; Miss AL Simpson—Krugman is eloquent on how artist intervention so often proves the value of new technology, like the Web3 world of blockchain and NFTs. “That’s what always happens with new technologies,” he says. “What good is vinyl pressing technology without musicians? It’s just inert technology. It’s the artists who step in, add context and culture, and make these technologies culturally relevant. Until 2020, there wasn’t much creative culture around the blockchain space and the cryptocurrency space. But when artists came and started symbolizing their artwork, there was an explosion of creativity. He pays tribute to the Web3 pioneers who “laid this incredible foundation for us, the artists, to come and build a cultural layer.”
A test case for a future digital economy
Jabban sees the art world’s engagement with blockchain, in the form of NFTs, as a test case for a future digital economy. His bank, he says, has been concerned about the custody of digital assets for several years. Some of its clients, traditional art collectors, had followed the bank in purchasing NFTs. And ABS seeks to institutionalize the space. “This is just the beginning,” he says, referring to other economic arguments for blockchain. “I think it’s around the corner. A lot is going to happen in the next two or three years. Art, he says, has “tested” the processes of curating digital assets.
“I would just encourage any artists who might be skeptical or hesitant” about NFTs, Krugman says, “to ignore the headlines about big sales and all these crazy things happening in any space. But look at the bubbling creativity that is developing around blockchain and understand that it is the future, it is a new paradigm.
For Vigniel, who receives a prize of 15,000 CHF (15,650 €) and whose winning work is included in Arab Bank Suisse digital art collection—the prize recognizes a quarter of a century of work in the field of generative art and digital art in general. “Now you see generative art in museums, at MoMA, at LACMA, so it’s happening, maybe slowly, but we have time. I’ve waited 25 years to be there, so let’s continue and move forward together on the path.