Galleries and paintings are over, the present is virtual.
At an auction in London on December 10, Christie's sold a digital collage titled Everdays: The First 5,000 Days for nearly €60 million. The sale instantly made Beeple, the work's creator, one of the most expensive living artists in the world.
But this huge and successful auction sale had a small and peculiar detail, and that is that the piece of art that was auctioned does not really exist in material form. Instead, it is an example of a "dematerialized work" known as a non-tangible token, or NFT.
Works of art that cannot be touched
NFTs use blockchain technology to verify digital objects such as music, text, videos, photos, or drawings, making each object unique. This verification is carried out by a network of interconnected computers throughout the world, and the process is considered inviolable and unfalsifiable.
To make an NFT, you can go to a specific platform like Rarible or OpenSea, pay a certain fee in crypto and upload your digital file there. Once the NFT is on the platform, the creator is free to sell it to any buyer willing to pay for it.
The NFT market has grown very rapidly around the world, and even people like Twitter founder Jack Dorsey have jumped on this new and lucrative bandwagon. In the middle of last year, Dorsey sold his first tweet as an NFT for just over €2.4 million and has pledged to donate the sum to various charities.
In cities like New York, the interest in NFTs has led the Superchief Gallery to open an exhibition dedicated to NFTs by opening a physical space, something that contradicts the very essence of the tokens. For the founders of the gallery, this new format is a unique opportunity to give digital artists the proper recognition and reward for their work.
In addition, NFT advocates argue, the tokens allow artists' copyrights to be protected, which is very important, because if all NFT creators get involved and take this business seriously, it can expand to a much higher level. than conventional art.
Another recent example of a successful sale of NFTs is that carried out by Till Lindemann, the singer of the German industrial metal band Rammstein, who also wanted to take a slice of this flourishing and lucrative market. The rights to an unreleased music video were put up for sale on the Internet for €100,000, with Lindemann offering not just one, but as many as 10 digital copies of the work. In addition, the singer also promised to offer buyers an exclusive dinner with him in a luxurious Moscow hotel, which included the flights, accommodation and visas for two people. In the work in question, Lindemann interprets the famous Russian song Lubimy Gorod.
