NFTs
With the announcement of the winner of the renamed ABS Digital Art Prize, have we reached an inflection point in conversations about NFTs and culture?
The artist born in France and based in Geneva RVig (full name Richard Vigniel) won the ABS Digital Art Award 2024 for him generative artwork Fleurs Du Malwhich is inspired by Charles Beaudalaire’s famous 1857 poetry collection of the same name.
The prize, sponsored by Arab Bank Switzerland (ABS) and formerly known as the ABS NFT Art Prize, is focused on digital art created by artists who have worked with non-fungible tokens (NFTs) – the programmable certificates of authenticity that sit on the blockchain, allowing artists to share their work with a global audience and sell directly to collectors, through cryptocurrencies like Ethereum. The award was presented on May 28th, in the third annual edition Non-Fungible Conference (NFC)in Lisbon.
Vigniel is a generative artist who has been using creative coding to make digital artworks since 1999 and has been working with NFTs for the past three years. He describes the Fleurs Du Mal video as “incorporating Baudelaire’s 126 poems as ribbons that evolve and flow according to the structure of poetry.”
He continues: “A visual realm is created where the ribbons intertwine and blend, mirroring the structure of the text. The result is a dance between the individual poems… with each ribbon moving independently, driven purely by the shape and construction of the words.” Work is offered in several formats, something that is characteristic of the NFT space in 2024. They are a three-minute looping video; five 10-minute videos, tokenized (or minted) through five individual NFTs; five high-resolution images in unique editions; a high-resolution image tokenized through limited edition NFTs; and a high-resolution limited edition print.
The decision to reposition the award as a “Digital Art Award” rather than an “NFT Art Award” is significant for Vigniel and the judges, who include Rani Jabban, managing director of Arab Bank Switzerland, and four-star digital artists . These artists are Clara Silvera collaborative Artificial Intelligence artist whose watchword is “taste is the new skill”; David Krugmanphotographer and founder of the ALLSHIPS creative community; William Mapan, an important generative artist known for his long works; It is Marjan Moghaddama longtime crypto artist and winner of the 2023 ABS NFT Art Prize.
For Vigniel, Jabban and Krugmanphotographer and founder of ALL SHIPS creative community, the name change is important to communicate to the art world at large what NFTs are – a technology that serves to certify, reveal and “tokenize” digital art in a way that can bring artists and collectors together – at the same time. time that makes it clear that they are not an art form in themselves.
The name change of the award also seems part of the maturation of a sphere which was dominated by sensational headlines three years ago about the inflated prices of digital artworks: the Artist Beeple’s Everyday: The First 5000 Days (2021) $69.3M Sale That Used an NFT, at Christie’s in March 2021; and artist Pak’s Merge, which saw 28,983 buyers mint NFTs on the Nifty Giftway platform for a combined total of US$91.8 million as of December 2021, among those who made noise. This has often resulted in many other areas of digital art worthy of further exploration, such as proof of work, the artistic concept and process, and the new ownership standards that the NFTS has enabled in these innovative projectsbeing forgotten.
“It’s just a technology, in the same way that a computer is a technology or a screen is a form of technology,” Krugman told The Art Newspaper, referring to the NFT. “In the big NFT craze or bubble of 2021, much of the coverage and media in the space has become very sensationalized and I think [NFTs were] misunderstood in many ways… Non-fungible tokens and blockchain are just the underlying technology. All this does is [surface and certify] digital objects. What artists do with these digital objects is something completely different. And changing the name [of the prize] to Digital Art is a recognition of this.”
“Every time I hear someone say NFT art, I say no, it’s not NFT art. It is not cryptoart, adds Vigniel, speaking to The Art Newspaper, “An NFT is a “certificate of authenticity, of ownership, that you can resell or not.” The history of ownership captured in this certificate, in the NFT, he says, is “important to the traditional art world. Having the reliability of a piece from its origin, from me, the artist… to this collector and then this one. It’s part of the story of each piece.”
The width and depth of the digital art space
For Jabban, who launched the award in 2023, the award and its evolution are part of a personal journey within the scope of NFTs. After the major events of 2021, he considered the increased interest in them to be nothing more than a speculative bubble, but changed his mind after meeting John Karp, who founded the Non-Fungible Conference in 2022. Through that meeting, Jabban “discovered the entire breadth and depth of space [of digital art that NFTs enable]”. “NFT is just a medium, it’s like an MP3 for music,” says Jabban, “So we’re talking about art and that’s what’s important. You see Richard Vigniel, who has been in generative art for 25 years. NFT brought him visibility and a medium that he could sell and reach a wider audience than before. But it’s also important to see that these artists were there before.”
Fleurs du Mal de Vigniel is offered in several formats: a three-minute looping video; five 10-minute videos, tokenized (or minted) through five individual NFTs; five high-resolution images in unique editions; a high-resolution image tokenized through limited edition NFTs; and a limited edition printed in high resolution Courtesy of the artist
Vigniel quotes Art Blocks as a particular platform that enabled “a new kind of long-form generative art.” NFT and blockchain technology generally, he says, — as a trusted source of provenance — has 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 selected artists— Leandro Herzog; MDD; Ivona Tau; Samantha Cavet and Eva Eller; Luís Paulo Caron; Mia Forrest; Roope Rainisto and Irina Angles; Antonio Samaniego; Miss AL Simpson—Krugman is eloquent about how the intervention of artists so often proves the value of a new technology, like the Web3 world of blockchain and NFTs. “This is what always happens with new technologies,” he says. “What’s the point of vinyl pressing technology without musicians? It’s just an inert technology. It is artists who add context and culture and make these technologies culturally relevant. And so, until 2020, there wasn’t a lot of creative culture around the blockchain space and the cryptocurrency space. But when artists arrived and started tokenizing artwork, there was an explosion of creativity.” He pays tribute to the Web3 pioneers who “laid this incredible foundation for us artists to come in 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 with the custody of digital assets for some years. Some of his clients, traditional art collectors, followed the bank in purchasing NFTs. And ABS seeks to institutionalize the space. “It’s just the beginning,” he says, referring to other economic cases for blockchain. “I think it’s just around the corner. A lot of things will happen in the next two or three years.” Art, he says, has “battle-tested” digital asset custody processes.
“I would just encourage any artists who might be skeptical or on the fence” about NFTs, says Krugman, “to ignore the headlines about big sales and about all these crazy things that happen in any space. But look at the bubbling creativity that is growing around blockchain and understand that this is the future, this is a new paradigm.”
For Vigniel – who receives a prize of 15,000 CHF (€15,650) and has his winning work included in the Arab Bank Switzerland Digital Art Collection—the award is a validation of the work of a quarter of a century in generative art and digital art in general. “Now you see generative art in museums, at MoMA, at LACMA, so it’s coming, maybe slowly, but we have time. I waited 25 years to be there, so let’s keep going and move forward together.”