IS NFT A FAD OR A SERIOUS ART TREND ?
As the cryptocurrency market crashes it becomes most relevant to look at the ‘trend’ of the NFT, even while those in the ecosystem have termed this decline as a short-term correction. On Wednesday (19-05-21) a big correction was announced with prices of major currencies, including the Bitcoin, Ethereum and the BNB, that took a 30 percent nosedive in 24 hours.
We threw these questions in the air and came back with interesting results, especially after the hammer came down on Beeple’s NFT at $69.3m followed by author Ben Lewis’s take on Leonardo da Vinci’s painting ‘Salvator Mundi.’
The 2020s brought us COVID, it also brought in another ‘virus’ that is both the nemesis and the joy of the online art community. It’s called Non-Fungible Tokens or NFTs. Some call it the hottest new commodity in the art world while for others, it’s a scam. Many artists and creative individuals have lamented that their own work has been plagiarized in NFT form or outright stolen from their online accounts. Many are banging their heads against their canvases as they watch the likes of Leonardo da Vinci get NFTed and then sold for ridiculous amounts online in cryptocurrency.
The latest and hottest trending NFT is a version of Leonardo da Vinci’s painting ‘Salvator Mundi,’ holding a wad of cash that is minted as an NFT. The perpetrator? A noble sounding Ben Lewis, the author of the book ‘The Last Leonardo’, announced that he was going to right the wrong done to the owners of the painting- the Hendry family, based in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. The act of sticking a wad of dollars in Christ’s hand may not be in the best of taste, but it does prove the point that NFTs are a slippery slope.
Lewis’s NFT is entitled ‘Salvator Metaversi’ and it is a take-off on the controversial Leonardo painting that sold for Four Hundred and Fifty Million Dollars at Christie’s New York in November 2017. Lewis has declared that any profits from the NFT sale will be split between Lewis and the Hendry family. The painting first went up for auction in 2005 for One Thousand One Hundred and Seventy Five Dollars (with fees). The family received Seven Hundred Dollars after fees were deducted. A pittance compared to what it finally sold for and that is the sad reality of the ‘auction-racket’.
It all began when Beeple, Mike Winklemann, sold his NFT Everyday: The First 5000 Days for Sixty Nine point Three Million Dollars with fees at Christie’s earlier this month (March 2021).
It was bought by Metakovan, now revealed to be Vignesh Sundaresan, a Tamil immigrant based in Singapore.
Another Indian who is familiar with the whole business of digital art, cryptocurrency and the NFT trend is sculptor and digital artist Shovin Bhattacharjee. He has been creating digital art since 2002. This experience served him well to form the basis for his installations since the proposals for the installation art projects required him to conceptualize them as a digital proposal first before its physical transformation. He has been among the first Indian artists to list his art as an NFT.
“NFT portals create a unique number/code for a digital work. I have always faced the challenge with a limited number of buyers and collectors for digital art as the notion still persists that digital art is not ‘authentic art’. There are also concerns relating to copyright. NFTs exist as a unique entity. My digital works are now better received and valued,” says Bhattacharjee, who is one of the few who are relieved that the NFT is finally getting its ‘due.’ He recently sold his first NFT artwork at art auction opensea.io that allows its netizens to ‘discover, collect and sell extraordinary NFTs’.
However, Lewis points out that it is not just the living artists who should be reaping the rewards. “Artists will get a percentage of NFT secondary sales; I’d like to see a similar practice adopted by the auction houses with a percentage of the resale of family heirlooms and treasures going to the original owners,” Lewis says. The percentage to the family has been an ongoing battle in India not just for the NFT but also paintings and sculptures sold to auction houses by artist’s families in times of need. Usually, the auction house gets a good reasonable price for the work and then sells it at a high price, which is sometimes triple the amount they paid for it.
The thing about non-fungible tokens or NFTs, the hottest new commodity in the art world, is that they have proven that they can be fabricated out of truly anything. Some experts have suggested that the music industry will sell merchandise in the future in the form of NFTs.
Addressing the matter of stealing of original artworks and making them NFTs, Fine Art Professional Aakshat Sinha says, “Creating fakes or stealing ideas from artworks and copying them down has been happening for ages. It’s not a new trend but certainly the copyright problem has to be solved and it has always existed,” he reasons.
Moreover, the NFT is not the original artwork, it’s just the digital code that gives you rights over the content. Then what the owner does with the content depends on what kind of rights the artist has given with the NFT. In the case of Beeple, an LCD with the image on it was gifted to the bidder.
Sinha shares with us about a Russian artist Serge Marshenikov, who he follows on Instagram, who is a photorealist specializing in female portraits that he also creates into NFTs.
“Sergey is in the top hundred among NFT artists, and he has been practicing for many years, so that proves that the artists have to be consistent, not a flash in the pan,” says Sinha. Even Beeple’s collage of Five Thousand different artworks wasn’t created overnight.
Collecting NFTs is not a regular art collector’s mentality, it appeals only to a younger generation who believe in dealing in cryptocurrency and frankly those who have access to high-end computer devices. Currently it is largely a white male preoccupation but it has spread among tech-savvy Asians and holds the possibility of a faddish future. What it doesn’t have in its favour is that it takes a lot of electric-power to mint an NFT, close to what you would clock if you kept your LCD running for 10 years! Which means it would have the highest carbon footprint.
Text by Georgina Maddox
Image Courtesy: Shovin Bhattacharjee, Getty Images, Serge Marshennikov
Find more about NFT, Artists and the Artworks:
https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/
