Blockchain art?
“Rather than money issued by a nation and administrated by central banks, art is a networked, decentralized, widespread system of value.” (Hito Steyerl)
In 2018, we were the only art gallery dealing with blockchain art, exhibiting this movement's protagonists like Kevin ABOSCH Larva Labs Rob Myers and many more at the very first blockchain exhibition Perfect & Priceless - values of systems. I am happy to see our collectors who followed the gallery's artists and bought at the right time are now successful investors.
For the last few weeks, in the art market, we have seen a tremendous shift towards NFTs and everyone wants to own a pioneer's works, but there are no so many. With the Christie's auction sale this week of the NFT art and 1.2mio USD sale of digital crypto punk, there is no doubt that the market has embraced NFTs as fine art.
In 2019 we have exhibited unique physical punks at CADAF in NY, where we had Winklevoss twins buying one to their collection. Same year, another project by Larva Labs have been exhibited at Kate Vass Galerie - Autoglyths. Autoglyphs are the first “on-chain” generative art on the Ethereum blockchain. There were only 4 physical works and the digital ones were sold out within 1.5 hours.
Another talented pioneer blockchain artist Rob Myers, has been working with blockchain since 2014 and have created fascinating conceptual art works. Myers from New York is visualizing crypto currency transactions in his continuing series Blockchain Aesthetics while referencing concept art from the 1970s. In order to transmit crypto from one wallet to another wallet (peer to peer), a hashrate is being generated and compressed through a mathematical encryption method. The hashrates are always the same length independently from the size of information they contain. The artist renders Bitcoin transactions as rows of coloured squares or circles. Each byte of the 32-byte transaction is rendered as a square or a circle of a 256-colour palette. The transactions are being displayed on a monitor as colourful abstract moving images with a narrative context. Although the imagery reminds us of 4096 Colours by Gerhard Richter or the spot paintings by Damien Hirst, they have a different connotation. There were only four physical works ever produced and all of them exhibited at KVG and Cadaf the following year.
A common appetite for an art investment among Millenial art collectors and new principles in token economics have inspired world-renowned Irish artist Kevin Abosch to turn himself into cryptocurrency back in 2018. "We come into the world like newly minted coins - perfect and priceless. Yet we are constantly being ascribed a value." Abosch explains. He created 100 physical artworks and a limited edition of 10 million virtual artworks entitled IAMA Coin. The material works are stamped using the artist's own blood, with the contract address on the Ethereum blockchain corresponding to the creation of the 10 million virtual works. The virtual works are standard ERC-20 tokens, and token owners are free to share these artworks and even divide them into smaller pieces before sharing. We consider Kevin the only real "NFT artist" because his NFTs in 2018 were the actual art. Meaning there were no connected media- the actual unique TOKEN is art. Back in 2018-03-15 l 2018-03-27, he has created both YLAMBO & MDAV ('MAGEN DAVID). Interestingly, none of those was sold except YLAMBO inspired the Yellow Lambo neon sculpture, which was exhibited at Christie's London and then privately sold to Skype COO Michael Jackson for $400k.
Think how valuable the original YLAMBO & MDAV are?! It is definitely exciting to think of the value of things, but what's given is that people are now actively interested in crypto art. We see some that spend a lot of money on art and other things related to blockchain technology. It will be hard to break the record of neon sculpture, or 'Forever Rose' (1st NFT sold for $1 Mio) or recent sale of digital punk for $1.2 Mio. But who knows, maybe a picture of the Ethereum token or token itself will be sold for a record amount soon?
I came across this article https://www.krypto-magazin.de/perfect-priceless-wertesysteme-auf-der-blockchain/ and it gives a good overview of how things started. You may be surprised, but digital art can be scarce, and the good one is even rarer. So, whoever is interested in joining an exciting journey of collecting 'right' art-feel free to connect..