The last few weeks have seen an explosion in the sale of digital art, with real-life art and pieces with history on the internet being tokenized online and selling for huge amounts. This is what is happening with NFTs.
While the idea of destroying notable works of art as a means of fostering artistic expression is nothing new, recent times have sparked a new conversation among art connoisseurs, tech enthusiasts, and digital commentators alike: is it the art really art when it ceases to have its physical form?
The debate around so-called digital art , which is created, shared and owned exclusively online, has grown larger and more complicated than ever in recent years, and has become part of a larger conversation around the digital alternatives to the concepts of the real world, such as currency , for example, and the role they play in shaping human society in the future. But a new trend has brought this conversation into the mainstream.
In recent months, you may have seen a headline that refers to the sale of so-called “NFT”. Used as a kind of online capsule to grant someone exclusive access to a piece of data, the adoption of NFTs, or non-fungible tokens, by a subsector of online communities has led to the increasing monetization of these collectible data pieces.
Almost anything that is considered collectible or desirable, whether online has always existed as if it has occupied a place in physical space, it can become an NFT, which is linked permanently to the artwork it contains.
The NFT may be bought and sold themselves, even though they often contain artwork digital or even memes that people freely accessible online.
Part of the intrinsic value of buying artwork in NFT form comes from owning the token itself and knowing that it was expressly made, and often “signed” on the blockchain by the original creator himself – something like the which is why the Mona Lisa itself is priceless, but a print of it is not. And this has led to some widely shared memes being sold for ridiculous amounts of money.
Also Read:
- Gaming company Atari will release its own NFT tokens
- NFT News Update: Beeple’s painting was sold as an NFT token for $ 69.3 million
A copy of the Nyancat gif sold last month for $ 600,000 , while a Cryptopunk sold the same day for just over $ 1.6 million, setting a new NFT sales record in the process. It should be borne in mind that these are two widely distributed works of digital art. And the icing on the cake, Beeple just sold a work for 69 million when he had never raised more than $ 100 for his work.
The sale of NFT has exploded in the last year, but last month saw the biggest boom in this art form. OpenSea, NFT’s best-known marketplace, reported sales of $ 86.3 million in February, up from $ 8 million in January , and during that time, artists, creators, and online personalities have continued to experiment. with what can be considered digital art, but finding new ways for his work to be seen by the online community. Australian musician Flume , for example, presented a series of digital artwork in the form of NFT over the weekend, in collaboration with Sydney visual artist Jonathan Zawada.
Two of NFT’s biggest sales came this weekend, as both a real-world artwork and a piece of digital history went up for sale in NFT form.
First of all, the founder of Twitter himself put up for auction a token that contained the first tweet made by Jack Dorsey. As of Monday morning, the bid was $ 2.5 million, although some of those involved are believed to be willing to pay an eight-figure sum.
Most notably, however, a group of cryptocurrency enthusiasts acquired an original print of The Fools, a 2006 Banksy artwork that satirizes the record-breaking sale of Van Gogh’s Sunflowers from 1987, which was burned online and then went on sale in the form of NFT. It sold for $ 380,000, far exceeding its physical valuation of around $ 95,000.
