Nfts
Is this the start of a new NFT boom?
In March this year, the price of Bitcoin reached $73,000, an all-time high. The same month, a Christie’s NFT sale of Robert Alice’s work brought in $171,685, an auction organized by MoMA and the new media platform. Wild file reached $191,000 and Sotheby’s completed a digital art sale that tripled its estimate, totaling $613,664. Is this the start of a new NFT boom?
Maybe. Maybe not. Exhausted by the crypto market’s many dips and bumps, those in the art ecosystem aren’t too optimistic. The party line seems to be that focusing on the art itself, as opposed to the digital mechanisms of selling it, remains vital. Ultimately, talking about NFTs is not useful for attracting collectors or building legitimacy.
“I’ve heard of a surge of interest in NFTs, but at this point in the new market’s life cycle, I’m very wary of this surge of interest, to make any of them decisions quickly based on that, or encouraging an artist to release a project in a certain way because of that,” said Ariel Hudes, head of Pace Verso, the digital art arm of Pace Gallery. “We have seen that interest in NFTs comes and goes very quickly and is very market dependent. I think very clearly that art is separate from the medium of transaction and so talking about NFTs just doesn’t seem interesting.
Mushroom, Registration 21. The first lot of the “Natively Digital: A Curated Ordinals Sale” at Sotheby’s. Courtesy of Sotheby’s
Sarah Rossien, associate artistic director of Art blocks, an NFT platform for generative art, agrees. “We are intentionally moving away from ‘NFT,’” Rossien said. “There is a connotation that is inaccurate or at least misunderstood. As we try to find new collectors and try to be leaders in this field, we are leading with art. Why should we take the lead with the mechanics of selling this art with tokens? »
When Mike Winkelmann (aka Beeple) became the third most expensive living artist, after his NFT Every day: the first 5,000 days sold at a 2021 Christie’s auction for $69.3 million, the art and technology industries began to collaborate like never before. This moment introduced an alien aesthetic, a new form of currency, and a new type of collector into the art ecosystem. After the crash, these worlds seemed separated again.
Even with the price of Bitcoin and Ethereum rising, the Web3 natives who actually determine NFT prices aren’t showing much interest in digital art. Instead, the rabid energy once saved for the Bored Ape Yacht Club was redirected into coins with names like Donotfomoew, Dogwifhat, and Doge. There’s also a lot of interest in a new Twitter-like platform called Farcaster, where people’s posts are accompanied by branded coins. This part of Web3 will probably never join the art world, even if some in that main art world want a piece of the crypto pie.
However, now that digital art can be created on Bitcoin (previously this was only done on Ethereum), some believe it is possible to bring different factions together again. The art created by Bitcoin is called Ordinals, and with the market rising, this is the space that appears to offer opportunities. Sotheby’s is particularly keen to adopt them.
“Ordinals has opened itself up to a whole new audience of Bitcoiners,” said Michael Bouhanna, head of digital art and NFTs at Sotheby’s. “There are people who only work on this one channel, so this change suddenly brought a new market, new collectors and we had some very successful sales selling Ordinals.”
The auction house’s “Natively Digital: An Ordinals Curated Sale” offering brought in $1,097,534 (or 26 BTC). However, these first signals have not yet appealed to established artists or the people who manage them. No one is rushing to produce a money-raising NFT project or sell on NFT marketplaces.
Ethereum price tracking in Shiyan, China, November 2022. Photo by CFOTO/Future Publishing via Getty Images.
“NFT is a dirty word right now,” said Sean Mosovich, co-founder of Feral File. “But what surprised me the most was that in 2023, while cryptocurrencies were crying because SBF lost their money, museums were getting them back. Feral Files has acquired 27 works of art acquired by major institutions over the past year.
A particularly active institution is the Center Pompidou. She acquired 14 digital artworks in February, including a work by the new media artist Anne Spalter. For Spalter, who found success thanks to the NFT boom, the role of institutions in preserving and selling digital art is essential, especially when technological complexity and lack of security in the Web3 space have led to so many thefts and scams.
“Personally, I don’t really care about decentralization. In fact, I think some centralization is actually better for the art world,” Spalter said. “For the average art collector, it can’t be like, ‘Oh, you’re going to spend $50,000.’ [on this NFT] but maybe you’ll lose it in a split second. Don’t complain about it. It was your fault. Yeah, that’s not really going to fly.
LoVid installation view Tide Predictor on the Schlosser Media Wall at the Museum of the Moving Image in Queens, New York. Courtesy of Thanassi Karageorgiou/MoMI.
Spalter herself has been a victim of the vagaries of the crypto market. His 2020 piece The wonder of it was sold at auction by Sotheby’s for $12,600, but it was later orphaned.
“The auction happened at the end of 2022 and everything fell apart,” Spalter explained. “The person who bought it was running some kind of start-up that went bankrupt and never completed the purchase. But I didn’t think I could re-register it. It was an absolute record for me. It was a very important piece in my practice and I wanted it to reflect that, so I sat on it for a while.
After a meeting with the Center Pompidou, Spalter proposed the work to the institution which accepted it. Although the work was donated as an NFT, the artist also provided the full video artwork on several backup USB drives, as well as a written certificate of authenticity. When it comes to saving these digital works for posterity, the promise of blockchain’s permanent ledger simply isn’t enough.
“The preservation issue was holding back some of these institutions, but I think they are realizing that acquiring these works is not dependent on blockchain,” Spalter said. “That’s only part of the problem.”
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