8 minute read
CRYPTO V I S I ON
H O W T H E A R T W O R L D I S C A S H I N G I N O N N F T S
BY MORGAN CRONIN
“You ever watch Sci-Fi growing up and you see spaceships?” Edward Zipco, Co-founder and Director of Superchief Gallery NFT asks while sitting across from me on Zoom. “You see these people living on planets that are normal people, how? There’s not like five billionaires with spaceships. It’s like… there’s spaceships and everybodys got them.”
Zipco and I are discussing NFTs, which stands for “nonfungible token,” the blockchain, and cryptocurrency. Buzzwords that seem to permeate mainstream media. In the most basic definition, NFTs can be defined as digital art. When I first heard the term NFT in the early days of the pandemic, I found myself scrolling TikTok and came across influencer and entrepreneur Gary Vaynerchuk. Gary Vee, as he is referenced online, is the co-founder of restaurant reservation app Resy. He was also an early investor in Coinbase, Snap, Venmo, and Twitter. Gary Vee garnered a following with his brash, no-nonsense advice urging his followers into crypto, specifically NFTs. “NFTs are going be a big part of [our] lives. I really believe that. I think this is going to be a big market.” He says in one of his TikTok videos. Superchief Gallery NFT is the first NFT Gallery in the world. When I asked Zipco why he wanted to dedicate a gallery solely to NFTs, he replied, “I think it’s important to focus on showing what these things look like when you own them and live with them. I think other locations are doing what they do and then selling you something for your phone. What I want to do with this specific gallery is to focus on what we do as curators, and as people in the community. If there is an opportunity to showcase NFTs at the highest level, that’s what we’re looking to do, and then bring our artists to that focus.” On the surface, I had come to understand NFTs as limited-edition digital art, which is one use-case, but the function of the blockchain allows NFTs to expand exponentially beyond digital art. Jonathan Herman, Sports Marketer, and founder of BallerMR.com, explains NFTs as “a format to limit the duplication of digital content
by using blockchain technology that encrypts digital files. NFTs allow users to verify the authenticity of a limited number of copies produced by the content creator, and therefore create scarcity and value appreciation for [the] collectible items.” One of the most well-known crypto artists Beeple, pseudonym of digital artist Mike Winkelmann, made headlines when Christies auctioned his NFT “The First 5,000 Days” and sold it for a whopping $69.3 million. The piece is a collection of digital work that spans 13 years. Beeple entered the NFT market in October of 2020 when he heard how much money artists (many much less famous than him) were making. He started doing his own drops, including limited-edition sales of his “Everydays” collection, which drew attention from collectors Vignesh Sundaresan and Anand Venkateswaran, the founders of Metapurse. When Sundaresan and Venkateswaran caught word of Beeple’s NFT drops, they began collecting the work early and were ultimately the ones to offer the $69.3 million bid. Clive Thompson from The New York Times outlines the collectors’ plans for Beeple’s art saying, “for the first purchase – they bought plots in three online 3-D worlds and hired a team of designers to build virtual museums in each, filling them with Beeple’s art.” Thompson then described his virtual meeting with Sundaresan inside one of the museums where they wandered around as avatars. Thompson continues to relay that museums were only the beginning of their plan. Next, they wanted to turn Beeple’s work into a new cryptocurrency. They took the “Everydays” NFTs they had bought to create a new set of NFT tokens— 10 million in total— and called the new currency B2O. These tokens now represent fractional ownership in Beeple’s work, and Sundaresan and Venkateswaran will continue to pay Beeple royalties anytime his work is traded or resold. “A big part of NFTs is royalties for artists,” says Zipco. “To bring high level artists to this medium is to legitimize the medium. This is the first time that artists have been considered in the commercial application of their art. They are finally able to be considered long-term and taken care of in a more symbiotic relationship.” This digital exploration of virtual museums is a foray into what serious crypto enthusiasts refer to as the metaverse. It’s easy to imagine a future where we are surrounded by digital depictions of everything that we know in the tangible world. “The digital world, the metaverse, the NFT sphere is really exciting right now because it is at minimum a mirror to everything that we know that exists right now,” says Zipco. “The exciting part of it is that we finally don’t have that limitation because that is the bare minimum that can be achieved through this. It really is about what you can do when you escape the limitations of tangible reality- what would you do? What would an artist do?”
Yao Ming NFT Jersey , viewable with Adobe Aero and other augmented reality apps. BallerMR’s 3D-AR NFTs can be made as small as a matchbook or as large as a 20-story building. Photo courtesy of BallerMR.com.
Herman and his team are forging a path on the AR trend by creating augmented reality NFTs. “We hire and work with artists to create augmented reality versions of realworld items. Pick your favorite singer and think about the microphone that she used when she did her first concert at Madison Square Garden. What if that microphone was created in augmented reality where the collector can, with these glasses, see it right in front of them? They can stand behind it in their living room and there’s only 20 in the world.” Tech giants Facebook and Apple are already creating augmented reality glasses, and with the pandemic urging people to stay home, it makes sense why people have started curating a space for themselves in the digital world. “We’ve had this shift because of the pandemic with people really staying at home more than going out,” says Herman. “A lot of people are going to be experiencing things sitting on their couch, so whether it’s augmented
reality, or virtual reality, a lot of people will be experiencing museums, and exhibits, and seeing art right from their home without actually going anywhere. This technology allows them to do that.” The technology to which Herman is referring is the blockchain. In simple terms, blockchain is a system of recording information in a way that makes it difficult or impossible to change. It is essentially a digital ledger that is duplicated and distributed across the entire network of computer systems on the server. It is also the place where crypto currency and NFTs exist. The uses of the blockchain are ever-expanding. Early adapters and supporters alike believe the technology is the next revolution, drawing many comparisons to the birth of the internet. “The fact that there is a ledger online, on the blockchain, that proves provenance and can be transparent for the collector base, and much more accessible as people want to enter the secondary market to collect and sell, that’s never really been opened to the public to participate until this point,” says Zipco. “With major artists getting into the field, I think it’s how artists are going to use this as a new medium to express themselves and how the mechanism of an NFT will support transparency practices in the traditional art world as well.” Zipco draws parallels between NFTs integration into the mainstream and his early days with the gallery when he wanted to showcase niche artists. “We were part of the underground New York scene when street art and graffiti was really just being allowed into the gallery system and fine art world,” says Zipco. “I watched our community go from not being allowed to participate, to being the darlings of this new type of art. When showing what digital artists from our community were doing, it was a lot of really great stuff, and we thought it was important to show, but we saw it was the same situation where they were being kept out of being taken seriously as something that has value and something that is art. We really had to fight to gain credibility and legitimacy for digital artists. Then NFTs came along, and we saw this as that moment. NFTs act as the mechanism that house digital art, which is arguably the medium of our time.”
A main draw for NFTs and cryptocurrency is the decentralized aspect. Crypto artists, for example, can sell their work directly without the need for a hosting platform. Exchanges are peer-to-peer and logged on the blockchain. There is no way to con, and no way to scam because everything is coded on the digital ledger. What you see, is truly what you get. While the blockchain may seem infallible, climate change activists are concerned with the amount of energy various cryptocurrencies utilize. “The project that’s being rolled out for Ethereum in the next 6-18 months is Ethereum 2.0–Ethereum 2.0 has a 99% reduction in electricity use which deals with that. Also, there are other crypto currencies that use a lot less, but the big deal is that the way energy is being gathered is changing.” Zipco tells me. “We are actually the first NFT marketplace that is carbon negative. When people buy NFTs from us, we’re purchasing verified carbon credits that more than exceed our use and that actively plant trees with satellite imagery. It’s pretty sophisticated. We did the research and the due diligence to do it right.” As for spaceships, Zipco says, “this is how it happens. It’s cryptocurrency, and who gets involved now. It’s those who make the smart choices now. That’s how we get spaceships.”
R i g h t p a g e :
A b o v e : Superchief Gallery NFT, the first
Photos by Kristin Otharsson Courtesy of Superchief Gallery NFT
P r e v i o u s s p r e a d : Jake Fried’s exhibition
Every WomanBiennial exhibition
