Does anyone really spend millions of dollars to buy NFT artwork?
Yes, and the price is more than a few million dollars. Although artworks can be sold at sky-high prices, it is not a rare novelty, but some emoticons, GIFs, pictures, videos, and even a tweet that anyone can easily view, download, screenshot, share and forward online can also be sold. To dozens of hundreds or even tens of millions of dollars, it has really refreshed many people's cognition.
On February 19th, Nyan Cat’s animated Gif, a flying rainbow kitten emoticon pack, was sold for more than $500,000.
"Rainbow cat gif being auctioned off"
A $500,000 Rainbow Cat GIF
The founder of Twitter, Jack Dorsey, also auctioned an NFT first tweet, with a bid of $2.5 million.
"The first tweet to be auctioned"
But even after the auction, the post will still be public on Twitter. Buyers will receive a certificate with Dorsey's digital signature and verification, as well as the metadata of the original Twitter. These data will include information such as the time and text content of Twitter.
The most shocking thing is the digital collage auctioned at Christie’s on March 11. "Nymphéas" sold for $15.3 million more in 2014.
（Everydays: The First 5000 Days）| image：Beeple」
NFT artworks sold at sky-high prices
On March 11, a mysterious buyer bought a digital collage for US$69.3 million. This auction is known as a historic moment in the art world and is also the third highest auction price for a living artist's work. The artwork being auctioned is a digital collage created by artist Mike Winkelmann (his better known name is Beeple), which contains 5000 digital illustrations, all of which are from his Everydays series-Beeple has created a painting every day for the past 13 years.
（Mike Winkelmann）
It is worth noting that before October last year, Beeple's works rarely sold for more than $100, but today's works can be sold at sky-high prices. This news immediately detonated the art collection circle and the financial technology circle. Collector Pablo Rodriguez-Fraile bought Beeple's work for $66,666.60 in November last year. It was resold for $6.6 million at the end of February this year. The value has doubled 100 times in just a few months.
Beeple is a digital artist and graphic designer. Since digital art can be copied infinitely, making the work worthless, he is always looking for a better way to sell his work. When a friend told him that there is a way to change this situation and mark his illustration work as a unique, single piece of art, Beeple listened and began to study NFT. Because of this, more and more artists are flocking to the NFT market because they want to seek greater success outside the traditional art world.
There are also many disputes about whether the sky-high price of Beeple's work has artistic value that matches its price. Apart from the value of NFT itself, the artistic value of the benevolent sees the benevolent and the wise sees the wisdom, just like the sentence in "The Story of Art" "There is no such thing as art in the world, only artists."
Discussions and disputes about NFT
The explosion of sky-high NFT artworks has attracted more and more people to discuss or participate in it. Data from CryptoArt, an analysis platform focused on the artisticization of cryptocurrencies, shows that in the last month of 2020, the total volume of NFT-based artworks reached 8.2 million U.S. dollars. This is a significant increase compared with the trading volume of only US$2.6 million in the previous month. The current market value of the entire collection exceeds US$130 billion. With the ever-increasing market value and the deepening of people's understanding of NFTs, people regard collectibles as mere hobbies and turn them into large-scale financial investment activities.
Many well-known artists began to pay attention to NFT and use it in their works, indicating that NFT is entering the mainstream. Of course, some people think that these are all hype and gimmicks, and they have derived some puzzling "artistic expressions." In early March, after an original work by the famous British street graffiti artist Banksy was sold as an NFT, the original work was burned in a live broadcast by a group of people claiming to be fans of encryption.
Burning paintings is also "burning money"
This artwork is called "Morons", a 2006 work, satirizing the sales record of Van Gogh's "Sunflower" in 1987; the work reads:
"I can't believe you morons actually buy this shit."
"Idiot" is worth 95,000 US dollars. It was originally bought from the Taglialatella Gallery in New York, but the value is now up in the air.
Banksy's "Morons"
Before the artwork was burned, encryption fans used blockchain technology to digitize the artwork on SuperFarm and saved it in digital form. One of them said that they chose Banksy's work deliberately because he tore up one of his own works at auction. They regard this burning incident as an expression of art itself, and are creating a new form of art work by creating this unique NFT.
O’Xian Ward, author of "The Way of Appreciation: How to Experience Contemporary Art," thinks this is a gimmick. He said: "You can say that everything is a work of art, but if you burn a banksy Work, and then you have to spend money to buy it. For me, this kind of artistic behavior is very low-level."
Everything can be NFT, so is NFT a bubble?
The current series of incidents about NFT must have hype in it, but the hype is showing signs of fading soon, because most of it is artificially priced. In addition, some people are worried about the existence of wash trading. For example, a virtual cat in CryptoKitties can sell for 600 ETH, but there is no reason to prove that it is worth that much.
Nevertheless, even if you are not interested in NFT right now, don't ignore it completely, because the ecosystem is changing. Just like DeFi, NFT may also become the next big event in the encryption field.
What is the prospect of NFT in the future?
Although NFT is or is about to bring disruptive changes to all walks of life, it is not without its shortcomings, and its problems stem from the blockchain on which it relies. Decentralized networks are not 100% user-friendly. For example, verifying authenticity, selling, purchasing, and storing NFTs requires at least a basic understanding of blockchain technology. The problem arises when most target audiences are only interested in the product rather than the underlying technology, and consumption of the product must rely on an understanding of the underlying technology.
In other words, the hope in the future is that blockchain can become mainstream like smartphones or the Internet. Although most people don't know how the two technically work, billions of people use them every day. And if NFT can do the same, it may create more and greater value.