Earlier this month, Christie’s Auctions announced that a digital painting of the Bitcoin code was sold for more than $130,000, compared with an initial estimate of $12,000-18,000. This is the first time that non-homogeneous tokens have been auctioned in a large traditional art auction house.
One of the events organized by Snark.art, “Bridge to Metaverse”, showed the tokenized works of well-known and emerging contemporary artists. This joint exhibition of works brings famous artists of our era, including Kabakovs, Kendell Geers, AES+F, Recycle Group, etc., to the blockchain field, and a series of panel discussions have become between the traditional art world and the blockchain-based art world. The art world based on blockchain has its own distribution system.
One criticism of the crypto art market is that people think these works are immature. Although people are focusing on memes and CryptoKitties, there are also serious artists who feel their presence in the crypto world.
The traditional artistic standpoint is a comment on the current state of affairs. This kind of comment is a way of subversive criticism, and it also magnifies the facts we have experienced.
In the new environment where we are tracked by everyday tools, this perfectly matches the anonymity brought by blockchain technology.
Will traditional artists bring their works into the shared blockchain field to affect emerging artists in the new field of crypto art? As the voices of politics, race, gender, and inequality become stronger, the influx of emerging artists in the current era may change the way art is created, collected, and viewed.
The traditional art market brings not only artists, but also gallerists and curators, who are naturally attracted by the growing market. In fact, as the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art purchases artworks from artists and displays them as permanent collections, we have already seen the trend of the traditional art market moving towards more classic buying methods.
Of course, this will also open the door to Basel crypto art, the Art Biennale and other curated events. The crypto art auctioned in these events will break the sales records of Christie’s or Sotheby’s.
Fifty years later, those first NFT artworks created by world-renowned artists may have high value, just like the first animation produced by John Whitney, the father of computer animation, as early as 1960. Just created the first animation art on his computer.
Serious contemporary artists reflect or even magnify the uncensored reality. In the current political environment, the combination between well-known artists and uncensored encryption art is actually a perfect fit.
Misha Libman, the co-founder of Snark.art, firmly believes that this is not only a challenge, but a challenge that can be enjoyed. He said:
“Although many creative industries (such as film, music and publishing) have transitioned to the digital realm many years ago, the $60 billion art market is basically still in the physical realm due to the inability to establish the digital scarcity of artworks. Blockchain technology not only provides the ability to establish the scarcity of digital content, but also has the potential to open up other exciting social mechanisms for artists to experiment. At the same time, it can directly attract new global audiences without crossing the boundaries of reality and other obstacles. “
So, is the audience of crypto art ready to accept the challenge of digital transformation? Especially when well-known artists now find themselves possessing a new technical medium and a way to attract audiences that they have never encountered before.
