Digital artists ride crypto sales wave
“When I realized I could make money with my own digital art, I was entirely mindblown.”
Göksu Ilgaz Koçakcıgil, artist
Last week, Mike Winkelmann, the digital artist better known as Beeple, sold his piece “Everydays — The First 5000 Days” at auction for more than $69 million. That dizzying sum made him the thirdhighestselling, living artist ever, behind only Jeff Koons and David Hockney.
The sale was remarkable for a number of reasons, but chief among them was the fact that the art, a collage of 5,000 smaller digital artworks, exists only in the digital space. More to the point, the buyer, known only as MetaKovan, did not receive a physical copy of the piece. Instead, they received a media file, hundreds of megabytes large, and an NFT — or nonfungible token, a blockchainbacked contract attesting that they own the original digital copy.
There was plenty of handwringing to go around. Is there real value in NFTs or was all this merely the result of a market bubble? Do NFTs represent an existential ecological threat? Was the piece itself any good?
Depends on who you ask — everybody seems to have an opinion about this young market.
Away from all the internet
breaking headlines, though, Bay Area artists and designers — many of whom had been working in the digital token space for months or years before “NFT” became a littleunderstood household phrase — seemed unbothered by the latest media hype cycle (even if it is driving up the cost of minting NFTs). Instead, they were focused on what they see as new futures in the form, both financially and artistically. As one San Francisco artist, Göksu Ilgaz Koçakcıgil (aka @skywaterr), put it, “When I realized I could make money with my own digital art, I was entirely mindblown. I was like my life is about to change.”
Corbin Bell, or @Pixel Activist, moved to San Francisco two years ago. For a long time, he felt out of place, unable to find a single design job. “I literally never got an interview in two years,” he said. He wound up driving for Postmates and Caviar to make rent. Then, last summer, he started hearing about the NFT technology. He decided to try minting his own work.
It took months of trial and error, but on Feb. 6, he finally made his first sale. The piece, “Enter the Chain,” a looping video of a spiral parking lot with an M.C. Escherlike feel, went for .385 Ether, the currency backed by the Ethereum blockchain — something like
$640 at the time. It was the first time he’d ever sold a piece of his art. Since then, he’s sold three other pieces. Two of which went for one Ethereum each — about $1,500 a pop.
“It’s a way to do what you really love. There’s no compromising,” Bell says. In a short time, NFTs have become a path toward financial stability for him and other artists he knows. “It’s just opened up a way for the misfits, as corny as that sounds.”
When Bell talks about a new way for the misfits, he’s not just talking money. There’s also a sense that this new technology can support communities. Danny Jones, a selftaught San Francisco graphic designer who also goes by Yasly, sold his first NFT, “Super Wild,” on Feb. 18, a day after listing it, for 1.99 Ether (or about $3,900 at the time). The piece is a soothing, looped video
of flowers frozen in a translucent rainbow block that is forever rotating.
Jones took that and other money he’s made from NFT sales and reinvested it in other artists. “I just bought an NFT from my friend ... I won (their) auction and got to tangibly support her. Money is definitely not the only motivator in any of this for me.”
Nonfungible tokens are not new, strictly speaking; they’ve been around, in one form or another, for about six years.
They’re backed by the same sort of blockchain technology that supports various cryptocurrencies. In this case, Ethereum is the currency of choice. But unlike individual Ether, which are interchangeable with one another, NFTs are oneofakind. Essentially, artists can go to an exchange, “mint” their artwork as an NFT, and auction it off. (Sometimes they’ll also include a physical copy with the sale.) Right now, most NFTs lean toward visual art, but it’s just as possible to mint certificates for digital trading cards, music albums, video games, even experiences. Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey signed and then sold the first tweet he ever tweeted.
After steadily rising in popularity last year — Beeple’s first sale, for $6,666.66, occurred in October — the technology crossed over into the mainstream last month. That’s when celebrity culture got into the act. The musician Grimes sold $6 million worth of NFTs. The classic Nyan Cat meme — a cat with a poptart body, propelled through space by rainbow exhaust — sold for just under $600,000.
Both Bell and Jones listed their pieces on Foundation, an inviteonly NFT listing site popular with Bay Area artists. Kayvon Tehranian, the site’s CEO, says Foundation launched with 50 artists in February, after doing a year of closed experimentation with NFTs, and now they list thousands of artists. “I could give you a number and that number will be massively outdated tomorrow.”
The current boom in attention, Tehranian says, is no doubt part of the usual internet hype cycle, but that doesn’t mean NFTs are a some shortlived trend. “You have artists that are completely reorienting their practices around this technology.” He describes NFTs as a “new layer” to the internet, one that has the potential to fundamentally change the way things operate. “People have trouble seeing that because ... exponential growth is very hard to understand.”
Barry Threw, executive director of Gray Area, the Mission District art and technology space, spoke about the blockchain’s transformational potential in similar terms. “We’re in the CompuServe age of this stuff. Like, we haven’t even gone to AOL or MySpace or, you know, even Facebook yet in terms of lineages, of how technologies develop.”
At the moment, though, Threw describes it in simple terms: “It’s an asset bubble, it’s a hype bubble and it provides some opportunity for artists to have some traction . ... (But) it’s a market that’s just as interested in buying memes as it is in buying art.”
Legacy art institutions are keeping their eyes on the form, too. Representatives for both YBCA and the Fine Art Museums said they have no plans to start collecting NFTs, but they’re watching how artists use the space.
Three years ago, while Koçakcıgil was working her way through a degree in visual com
munication design at San Francisco State, she looked around and “saw all of this amazing digital work that nobody was paying for” and imagined, one day, opening up a digital art gallery, a real physical place with artwork on display.
Up until recently, that felt more like a dream. She had files full of digital art work she “didn’t think anybody cared” about. Then, in November, she started joining crypto art communities and found out about NFTs, a paradigmshifting discovery.
In January, she did her first drop of NFTbacked work, and earlier this month, she unveiled a new collection on Foundation she calls “BLÖBS.” To create each piece, she uses a mix of physical and digital techniques and collaborates with an artificial intelligence. “BLÖB No1” is a pulsating pink abstraction that moves in an endless loop against a black screen.
It sold on March 6 for 0.169 Ether — or about $310.