Art of the future
NFTS OPEN UP A NEW WORLD OF DIGITAL ART COLLECTING
Gunnar Magnus was scrolling through Instagram last month when he saw a friend posting about something called NFTs, or non-fungible tokens. NFTs are files you can buy or sell using Ethereum and other types of cryptocurrencies. Because they are coded into the blockchain, they can be easily tracked transaction by transaction.
“Pretty much like almost immediately I was completely absorbed into this thing. I didn’t sleep for a solid three weeks,” Magnus said. “I was just learning everything I could.”
Magnus is an artist based in Brooklyn currently living in New Canaan. He creates surrealists oil paintings of fantastical creatures.
He’s one of many artists pivoting into the world of NFT art – and finding great success.
The day after he first saw that Instagram post, he hopped online and sold three pieces almost immediately.
Since he started making a name for himself in NFT communities only a month ago, he’s sold 15 NFT pieces and eight physical pieces. Before his work with NFTs, he typically sold one or two paintings every two or three months.
One of his NFTs is listed at .2 Ethereum. That’s $353.57.
“It’s a true digital renaissance that we’re seeing with this,” Magnus said.
The appeal to having an NFT is different from just downloading a .jpg or trading a Pokemon card. Magnus compared it to buying and selling physical artwork. You can print out a Picasso painting and hang it on your wall, but that’s not the same as owning the original by Picasso.
NFTs allow art collectors to own original copies of digital art that cannot be changed. And beyond that, artists can pin a royalties agreement to their sales, so every time the art changes hands, the artist gets a percentage of that sale.
NFTs are also more than just a still piece of art, they can be animated on a loop, like a .gif or a very short video. So, those moving portrait galleries from “Harry Potter?” NFTs make those a reality.
There’s a benefit to artists who get to bypass the middleman and sell their art straight to consumers, and there’s value for collectors who get in on this first wave of what could possibly be the future of art.
But it also could change how every single person interacts with the art market.
Mark Capitella is a custom puzzle maker in East Haddam. He’s currently working on a way to turn his puzzles into NFTs by animating them, moving pieces around in a 3-D space on a sort of lazy susan.
He first heard about NFTs in October 2017, when he watched a Youtube video by Charles Hoskinson, the founder of a cryptocurrency called Cardano .
“I see artists being able to create unique pieces of high resolution NFTs,” Capitella said. “You can literally walk into, let’s say, a future home, or even some homes today are so technologically advanced, you can have an 85-inch 4k or 8k TV on the wall, and you can literally just go through your phone, select an NFT and then flick it right at your wall, and it will display on that screen as a super high-res piece of art in your home.”
Ryan Maloney, who lives in New Canaan, calls himself a creative addict and an obsessive drawer. He founded his own company called Medialuv. He creates books, art, animated videos and NFTs. One of the first things on his website is a step-by-step list that teaches people how to make NFTs. He also makes TikToks explaining his process.
His first NFT series is called “Beastly Ballers,” a set of collectible cards featuring zany animated animals in sports gear.
“A year ago I started making Beastly Ballers as a printed card line, and what I would have had to do is go to China, had them printed, had them shipped over here to a toy or publishing company and try to sell them in a Walgreens or Walmart, and it’s just a really inefficient process,” Maloney said.
Maloney put the Beastly Ballers line on the backburner for a year. Then he started to hear about NFTs.
“I heard about NFTs for a year or two, but just like everybody else I was like ‘eh, this is just a fad. This is not anything.’ And then I was sitting around, and I just read a couple articles, and it was like a lightbulb went off: ‘Wait, I have all these characters sitting around that I’ve pitched but that toy companies won’t take a chance on because it’s just a huge cost to produce either the toy or the card.’” Maloney said.
“So I said, ‘I have Beastly Ballers right here and probably 100 other character lines, let’s make some NFTs.’”
So far, Maloney has sold 20 out of his 24 NFTs, and his cards are already starting to compete with and be traded for big-name collectibles.
“The collectors will reach out to you on Twitter, and they're being offered NBA Top Shots for Beastly Ballers,” he said. “It's kind of fun to see something you created compete against these big brand names, even though it's just me as a single creator.”
Each of Maloney’s cards goes for anywhere between .03 and .05 Ethereum, which is between $56 and $90.
Now that he’s seen the appeal of NFTs — not as just a way to make money, but also as a pleasing piece of art — he’s looking into buying some NFT artwork to display in his own home.
“I’m starting to look around my house at frames and I’m thinking ‘well these look a little boring.’ I sort of want to see a subtle animated loop. That really would be cool,” Maloney said, laughing.
“At first I thought to myself, ‘Why would anybody buy these,’ but now I start to see that NFTs —it's like the digital world creeping into every part of our lives.”
Maloney said that in the future, he sees the term “NFT” dropping away, kind of like the term “mp3.”
But NFTs are not fool-proof yet. There are still some drawbacks.
There’s a pollution problem. The system uses thousands of computers around the globe running at the same time to verify the blockchain, which makes an enormous carbon footprint. The Ethereum block chain in particular has “gas fees,” which can average out to $50 to $70 per piece. There are other companies, like Cardano, working to create technology that uses less energy, bringing gas fees as low as 10 cents.
There’s also an issue of accessibility. Not everyone has the technology needed to create NFTs or the money to buy Ethereum. Magnus said this is where the arts community comes into play.
He’s seen artists donate money to people looking to create their own NFTs and artists volunteer their time to teach skills on platforms like Clubhouse. Magnus learned how to animate using Photoshop because a fellow artist took two hours to teach him the basics.
“That is so common. That is the space. We’re abandoning the Instagram social competition and instead helping each other thrive and building each other up,” Magnus said.
“There’s so much that’s possible and so much hope that I haven’t felt in a long time.”