Damien Hirst, born in Bristol, England in 1965, grew up in Leeds, northern England. From 1986 to 1989, he studied at the Jacob Kramer School of Art in Leeds and Goldsmiths College, University of London, and lived and worked in Devon and London. Britains most expensive contemporary artist.
— Damien Hirst
I believe that there are always some friends in the social media circles of many friends who follow the celebrity trend and change their avatars to phantom bears with star eyes.
On December 31, 2021, Jay Chou and his wife posted a Phanta Bear NFT image for the first time on Ins, saying that this was the first special gift they received.
On the evening of January 3rd, Jay Chou posted the NFT avatar PHANTA BEAR #10000 he received again. And posted, Brother 2022, change your avatar for a few months first, and feel the feeling of the metaverse.
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▼Phanta Bear, minted on January 1, took the NFT world by storm within a week
For a while, the NFT artwork Phanta Bear jointly produced by Jay Chous trendy brand PHANTACi x Ezek became a hot topic around the world.
However, JVR Music, the record company co-founded by Jay Chou, issued a statement on its official Weibo on January 3, stating that this commercial practice is not an NFT launched by Jay Chou.
Jay Chou only received the Phanta Bear NFT gift from PHANTACi, and he was also happy with the successful sales of the product, but Jay Chou did not participate in any planning and operation of this commercial activity, nor did he obtain any income.
However, the market will not care so much, and the capital will not be soft-hearted. As long as you can catch good news, you will not let go of a wave of publicity opportunities. Various content, hot discussions, and Internet hot searches can up as much as possible. .
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01. The puppet of surrealism
Digital art is a multibillion-dollar business, and everyone from the worlds socialite Paris Hilton to the worlds richest artist Damien Hirst is trading NFTs.
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▼Hilton plays songs at E11EVEN (the first major nightclub in the United States to accept cryptocurrency)
In an interview with foreign media in October 2021, Hilton explained the issue of NFT, NFT is actually much simpler than you think.
When it comes to Hilton, shes many things—reality star, heiress, fitness guru whos less likely to use designer handbags than weights.
But until now, she has never been considered a major figure in the art world. When artists acknowledge her, they usually do so only to fetishize her image.
In 2008, Damien Hirst bought a portrait of her by artist Jonathan Yeo, in which her body is constructed from a collage of images cut from pornographic magazines .
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▼Digital painting by American artist Beeple at the NFT exhibition
In November 2021, Hilton attended a Bitcoin conference in Miami, and at the opening party, clients paid up to $25,000 for VIP seating to watch her DJ in a pair of diamond-encrusted headphones.
NFT stands for non-fungible token, a digital token that can be exchanged for digital artwork, Hilton explained. You can put it on your computer server or on your phone. I have these screens at home to show them off.
Sure enough, at Hiltons Beverly Hills mansion, a screen displayed an NFT she made in collaboration with digital artist Blake Kathryn.
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▼Paris Hilton teamed up with artist Blake Kathryn to create a digital tribute to her Chihuahua Tinkerbell
Hilton first started investing in cryptocurrencies in 2016. I became friends with the founder of Ethereum, she said. (Ethereum produces ether, the currency in which most NFTs are traded.) Since then, she has devoted herself to collecting crypto art and owns more than 150 NFTs.
For advocates of NFTs, the technology offers a revolutionary new way to sell art and bypass arrogant cultural gatekeepers whose resistance to the crypto future seems to be what the 19th-century Parisian art world did to Impressionism. Same with contempt.
In this case, the relevance of the Hilton brand to the NFT movement makes sense.
Pink, bejeweled, and openly motivated by her desire to be as rich and famous as possible, she was a far cry from the kind of person whose work usually shows in a blue-chip gallery or hangs in an art fair booth.
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▼Paris Hilton and artist Blake Kathryn (Blake Kathryn) dirt and nettle plants
For critics, from critic Waldemar Januszczak to artist David Hockney, the NFT market is home to morally bankrupt, environmentally damaging predators whose creations barely qualify as art.
While most of us are still struggling to remember what fungible means, a battle is underway to define how NFTs are understood.
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02. The bursting of the bubble
Amotleys celebrity team has already tried selling digital art, including Snoop Dogg, Lindsay Lohan, and John Cleese, so Ezek is a little slow to release the Jaylen Bear NFT this time around.
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▼Morons is one of Banksys series of original prints
But only a fraction of the proceeds from art NFTs end up in the bank accounts of galleries, which, aside from auction houses, have traditionally captured the lions share of art market profits.
And in March 2021, crypto firm Injective Protocol bought Morons, a physical artwork by Banksy, for $95,000, depicting a framed picture sold by an auctioneer with the words: I cant believe You idiots would really buy this shit.
They then burned the photo and then sold digital tokens of the work for $380,000. The campaign is a marketing ploy designed to stoke outrage, drum up publicity and profit.
The symbolism, however, is powerful: digital art is here to supplant its physical predecessor, and its imminent supremacy should be manifested through a higher price tag.
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▼Paris Hilton x Blake Kathryns Iconic Crypto Queen, Price: +$1.11 million
Despite having sold it, Hilton was able to display the Iconic Crypto Queen at home, which is part of the NFTs appeal and the challenge it poses to established business models of trading and acquiring art.
With a simple Google search, anyone can find and download an NFT-related file for free and store it on their phone or computer, but only the owner has the right to sell it.
Each NFT is unique, and all transactions are recorded on the blockchain, a database invented in 2008 to record the movement of cryptocurrencies.
Unlike commercial gallery business models, NFTs are designed to reduce the need for art dealers and enable artists to trade directly online, often through specialized auction sites.
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▼MBSJQ – Colorful Soul
Anyone can buy NFTs, and prices are often a mystery in high-end commercial galleries, listed as a matter of public record.
Every time an NFT is resold, its creator also profits — lacking a built-in royalty system in the physical art world, artists often feel as though they are being indemnified when their work is resold on the secondary market. harm.
A model of trading and sharing artwork built on the principles of financial transparency, royalties, and easy access to all may sound egalitarian. The reality is quite different. Once it was discovered that almost any digital product could be labeled and sold as a work of art, the circus rolled into town.
Everydays: The First 5000 Days sold for $69.3 million at Christies in New York. It is a collage of previous works by 40-year-old American Mike Winkelmann.
Since then, Kate Moss has sold a GIF of herself for more than $17,000; Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey has sold an image of her first tweet for $2.9 million; The director managed to sell an audio file of his own fart for $85. Dominic Cummings has even threatened to use the technology against Boris Johnson, releasing what he says is evidence of government malfeasance in the form of NFTs.
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▼Beeple blockchain bubble in NFT | Elon Musk
Quite a few small hobbyists are also in the affordable market, keen to celebrate the technology by investing in blockchain art. It didnt take long for the bubble to burst.
By May 2021, according to statistics, the daily sales of NFT have dropped by 60%. Crypto arts reputation has also taken a hit for its poor environmental record.
Nevertheless, advocates still believe that NFT can challenge the monopoly of commercial galleries on trading artworks, and even create a future in which physical artworks are replaced by digital artworks.
As Hilton puts it: “There are paintings worth $100 million or more, but if you think about it, it’s really just paint on canvas.”
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03. Jones story
In the beginning, before the circus, there were nerds. Inevitably, because this is the internet, there are cats too.
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▼Cryptokitties created by Kevin McCoy
Even though the first NFT was created by a man named Kevin McCoy in 2014, CryptoKitties have attracted attention and money, with some crypto kitties trading for hundreds of thousands of dollars.
In 2020, interest in NFTs has rapidly picked up as the cryptocurrency boom and the COVID-19 pandemic hastened our transition to screen-obsessed zombies. As a result, the value of works by a handful of artists skyrocketed.
These include painter Trevor Jones, 51, who lives in Edinburgh. You may never have heard of Jones, but he is the most successful NFT artist working in the UK.
He started making NFTs in 2019. Five years ago, I was struggling to pay my mortgage, he told the outlet. I went from having to borrow money from friends to pay bills to making $4 million a day.
Known for combining painting with digital technology, Jones often produces collages of famous artworks with a crypto twist.
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▼One of the NFT series of Bitcoin Bull
Jones was warm-hearted, unprepared for such a situation, and stunned by the rapid rise of his work. I grew up in a small logging community, he said of his childhood in western Canada, a place he described as rough.
When I was 25, a friend of mine got into a fight in a bar and was killed. He left shortly thereafter, eventually settling in Edinburgh, working as a waiter and later manager at the citys Hard Rock Cafe.
Jones told the media in an interview that he suffered a mental health crisis in his 30s. I broke up with my girlfriend and everything fell apart. At the time, it sounded cliche, but I decided I needed to find something to save me.
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▼Blocks, painted by numbers, algorithmic NFT art is breaking records
Things started to turn around for Jones in 2012, when he had the idea of incorporating QR codes into his art, drawing scannable barcodes on canvas in Mondrian-like colors.
Scanning the paintings takes viewers to an online gallery where anyone can upload their work. People were laughing at me at the time, he said. While gallery-goers dismissed him, he gained new online followers who ended up deep-pocketed.
In 2019, Jones began working with animators to turn his drawings into short videos and sell them in the form of NFTs.
One of his most successful creations is Bitcoin Angel, an NFT based on Berninis baroque masterpiece The Rapture of Saint Teresa, which he sold in 2020 for more than $3 million.
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▼Jones Bitcoin Angel, inspired by Bernini, sold for over $3 million in 2020
To sell Bitcoin Angels, Jones used a site called Nifty Gateway, one of many online auction sites designed to trade NFTs that are now flooded with aspiring crypto artists.
Browsing through the lots, each one shimmers and shakes, hoping to catch the collectors attention. On it, youll find GIFs of muffins turning into dogs, spinning trainers, flattering portraits of Elon Musk, and tons of naked robots with big tits.
Based on the evidence that art critic Dean Kissick has described the male-dominated NFT scene as Etsy for men, its easy to see why.
Apart from eye-catching sales, Nifty Gateway also provides a platform for aspiring entrepreneurs and hobbyists to practice their craft on computers instead of knotting lace plant hangers.
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▼Maria Gudjohnsen, Icelandic 3D artist
Art dealers have struggled to make online showrooms interesting or profitable during the pandemic as audiences have been unable to attend exhibitions and fairs in person.
As a result, global art sales fell by 22%. To rub salt in that wound, millions of dollars in cryptocurrencies are being exchanged for native digital art forms.
The technology was designed for the existing art world, said Noah Davis, a specialist at Christies in New York. Its an art form that doesnt need a gallery.
Davis helped sell Beeples $69 million NFT, the first piece of encrypted art to be listed at a major auction house.
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▼The legend of Marbendill continues. These half-fish, half-human creatures have lived in Icelandic waters for a long time, via PORTION
The artwork, which sold in an online auction in March, took two weeks to complete. Bidding opened at $100, and within an hour that number had risen to $1 million—the result of a slew of bids that were placed digitally.
Ive never seen anything like this. You cant bid so quickly at an auction unless you say: A million dollars, Davis said. And thats not possible online. It did. So all of these bidding had to be done incrementally and manually.”
I see my life as pre-Beeple and post-Beeple, he added in an interview ++. The world thinks the same before and after Jesus Christ. Beeple is like my Jesus.
In the months since, Christies has continued to profit from NFTs. In May, it paid $16.9 million for nine pixelated cartoon characters from the CryptoPunks collection, an early example of NFT art that has become a wildly popular collectible.
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▼NFT work Well, Good Soup by María Guðjohnsen, from PORTION
The images, which have been recovered from floppy disks and turned into NFTs, include drawings of bananas, flowers, and a can of Campbells Soup drawn on the artists Commodore Amiga computer, which alone sold for more than $1 million.
In general, the commercial gallery world has been understandably wary of adopting technologies designed to circumvent it. Behind the scenes, however, some galleries tried to woo Jones. He turned them down.
What can a commercial gallery do for me? he asked. “There was a gallery show and I worked for a year creating the painting and I paid for all the framing and studio overhead. I sent the painting to a commercial gallery. I may or may not sell it and the gallery charges 45% to 55% commission, they might pay after a month, six weeks, two months.”
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04. An ideal worth adhering to
Sometimes, the rift between the two art worlds seems to run deeper than differences in business models: a full-blown culture clash.
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▼Maurice Murdock (Moebocop): 100 years from now, I can see a world where technology and biology intersect more closely
“There are no challenges in NFT art,” conceptual art collector Pedro Barbosa told the New York Times, who believes that the ideas behind NFTs are often derivative and “have been explored by artists such as Josef Albers, László Moholy-Nagy, and Marcel Duchamp.”
David Hockney referred to NFTs as stupid little things for liars and scammers — a curious rebuke from an artist who is happy to embrace and monetize new digital technologies. Since 2009, Hockney has had a thriving business drawing for iPhones and iPads.
People like Jones, Hilton, crypto enthusiasts who fervently believe that NFTs are the future of art, now use the moniker traditional art world to refer to their physical competitors.
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▼JHPBA: In 2121, people will live forever, whether physically or through virtual copies
Charging more for a painting than an NFT, thus valuing physical art over digital art, could spark the ire of the crypto crowd.
When Jones sold Bitcoin Bull to Rodriguez Fryer, he also sold the original painting to the second-place bidder. In order not to offend his fans, he priced the painting at $55,000, which is $555.55 less than the NFT.
A handful of established contemporary artists, especially those already formed in their explicit pursuit of headlines and extreme wealth, have experimented with making NFTs — most notably Hirst, who released The Currency project in July.
Hearst sold 10,000 NFTs, each corresponding to a unique stippling, for $2,000 each.
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▼Kevin McCoys Quantum, the first ever NFT
What shocked art intellectuals most about NFT was its blatant entanglement with finance. Historically, the art of trading has been a pastime for the rich.
What matters to art history is the flattering portrayal of the rich and powerful, and artists have long been expected to perform what Tom Wolfe called the mating ritual of art—attracting the wealthy of interest to patrons and conservative institutions.
However, with NFTs, the distinction between artwork and assets seems to disappear. Instead of curated exhibitions are auction sites; the symbols of the marketplace have permeated the aesthetic language of art itself. Price, not ideas, dominates.
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▼Big Comic Art: Without our physical world, the Metaverse would not exist
“I’ve done everything from fashion to fragrance to endorsements,” Hilton said, adding that NFTs are another way for “fans to own a piece of me.”
In addition to collaborating with rapper Ice Cube, Jones recently created an NFT for whiskey company Macallan to be auctioned off alongside a cask of very expensive Scotch whiskey.
This appears to be an attempt at where NFTs are headed: not a radical new mode of the art of the trade, but a digital marketing gadget.
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▼For a true digital fashion week, forget everything you know
How should art be traded and viewed? Who can give value to art? Is there a moral or aesthetic code by which artists are expected to work, and who chooses to define it themselves? Why would anyone trade their money for numbers?
Then comes the big question: is there a meaningful distinction between artwork and assets?
The answer may not always be – but art is an ideal worth upholding if we want it to be more than a tool for glorifying finance and whipping up commodities.
