NFTs
Is this the start of a new NFT boom?
In March this year, the price of Bitcoin reached US$73,000, an all-time high. The same month, an NFT sale of Robert Alice’s work by Christie’s netted $171,685, an auction organized by MoMA and the new media platform Feral Archive fetched $191,000, and Sotheby’s completed a digital artwork sale that tripled its estimate, totaling $613,664. Is this the start of a new NFT boom?
Perhaps. Maybe not. Exhausted by the many crashes and bumps in the crypto market, those in the arts ecosystem are not overly hopeful. The party line seems to be that focusing on the art itself, as opposed to the digital mechanics of selling it, remains vital. Ultimately, talking about NFTs is not helpful in attracting collectors or building legitimacy.
“I’ve heard about renewed interest in NFTs, but at this point in the new market’s lifecycle I’m very wary of this renewed interest, in doing any make decisions quickly based on that, or encourage an artist to launch 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’m sure art is separate from the transaction medium and so talking about NFTs just doesn’t seem interesting.”
Mushroomotoshi, Registration 21. The first lot from “Native 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, shares the opinion. “We are intentionally moving away from ‘NFT,’” said Rossien. “There is a connotation to this that is inaccurate or at least misunderstood. As we try to find new collectors and try to be leaders in this space, we are leading with art. Why should we lead the mechanics of selling this art with tokens?”
When Mike Winkelmann (aka Beetle) 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 collaborating like never before. The moment brought an alien aesthetic, a new form of currency and a new type of collector to the arts ecosystem. After the fall, these worlds seemed to have separated again.
Even as the price of Bitcoin and Ethereum rises, the Web3 natives who really drive NFT prices are not showing much interest in digital art. Instead, angry energy once saved for the Bored Ape Yacht Club was redirected into meme 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 earn branded coins. This part of Web3 will probably never cross over into the art world, no matter how much some in that mainstream art world want a piece of the crypto pie.
However, now that digital art can be minted in Bitcoin (previously this was only done in Ethereum), some believe there is the potential to bring different factions together again. The art minted in Bitcoin is called Ordinals, and with the market rising, this is the space that appears to have opportunity. Sotheby’s is particularly interested in adopting them.
“Ordinals has opened itself up to a whole new audience of Bitcoiners,” said Sotheby’s head of digital art and NFTs, Michael Bouhanna. “There are people who are just in this chain, so this change suddenly brought in a new market, new collectors and we made some very successful sales selling Ordinals.”
The auction house’s “Native Digital: An Ordinals Curated Sale” raised $1,097,534 (or 26 BTC). However, these first signs have not yet tormented established artists or the people who manage them. No one is in a rush to produce a money-generating NFT project or to sell on NFT marketplaces.
Ethereum prices being tracked in Shiyan, China, in November 2022. Photo by CFOTO/Future Publishing via Getty Images.
“NFT is a dirty word right now,” said Feral File co-founder Sean Mosovich. “But the most surprising thing to me was that during 2023, when crypto people were crying because SBF lost their money, museums were collecting it. Feral Files obtained 27 works of art acquired by major institutions last year.”
One institution that has been particularly active is the Center Pompidou. Acquired 14 digital artworks in February, including a work by new media artist Anne Spalter. For Spalter, who has found success in the NFT boom, the role of institutions in preserving and selling digital art is critical, especially when technological complexity and lack of security in the Web3 space have led to so much theft and fraud.
“Personally, I don’t care much 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 grand.’ [on this NFT] but you might lose control in a split second. Don’t complain about it. That was your fault.’ Yes, this really won’t work.
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 was a victim of the vagaries of the crypto market. Your 2020 Play The wonder of it it was sold at a Sotheby’s auction for $12,600, but was later orphaned.
“The auction was at the end of 2022 and everything was falling apart,” explained Spalter. “The person who bought it was running some kind of start-up that failed and never completed the purchase. But I didn’t feel like I could list it again. It was a high point for me. It was a really important piece in my practice and I wanted it to be somewhere that reflected that, so I sat on it for a while.”
After meeting with the Center Pompidou, Spalter offered the job to the institution, which accepted it. While the work was delivered as an NFT, the artist also provided the full video artwork on several backup USB sticks, 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 some of these institutions back, but I think they are realizing that acquiring this work is not dependent on blockchain,” Spalter said. “That’s just part of it.”
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