A million dollars for eight thousand cartoon belugas is hardly fantastic news in a world where NFT is gaining popularity. Famous domestic performers also intend to sell tokens: on November 25, such plans were announced by the musical groups Hands Up and Little Big. Russian artists picked up the wave back in March, when the non-fungible token boom hit. Pokras Lampas, for example, made $ 55,000 for an NFT duck. What the top 10 domestic artists selling NFT look like, and how far they are in earnings to a schoolgirl, who, together with her brother, made a fortune in pictures with whales, read in the material “Izvestia”.
Explaining on the most expensive
You have a dollar, I have a dollar – we will exchange them, and nothing will change, explains the student in an educational show about NFT. “Do you have a dog? And I have a dog. I am sure you love your dog. And I love my dog. But are they equal? ” – continues he invites the adult interlocutor to imagine that they have exchanged pets: it will obviously upset both of them. This is how the boy explains the essence of NFT (Non-fungible token) – a non-fungible token. The child’s analogy also explains why it cannot be classified as a cryptocurrency.
So, the NFT can be, for example, a photograph of your dog. If you sell the token, the dog will, of course, remain at your home, but its digital snapshot will be owned by the buyer – the only one on the entire Internet. The exclusivity of dog photo ownership will be ensured by the blockchain.
Photo: frame Nyan Cat / YouTube
The cat from the meme Nyan Cat
An NFT can be created from any dataset, including a painting, audio recording, film, and so on. Actually, the token itself allows you to “stake out” the source for one person. It’s like a digital analogue of an auction lot. Its owner is free to do whatever he wants with it: resell, donate, keep it and not show it to anyone. The latter option particularly upset fans of Quentin Tarantino’s films when he announced plans to turn unpublished Pulp Fiction material into NFT – although due to disputes with Miramax, they risk being left on the shelf anyway.
Unlike additional materials for a cult Hollywood movie, a snapshot of your dog (even if it has exceptional charisma), unfortunately, is unlikely to find a large number of buyers. And without this, there will be no prices for which, for example, famous memes are sold. So, in March, an image was sold in the form of a token cat from the meme Nyan Cat. Despite the fact that the meme with a flying cat cookie in space was in circulation 10 years ago, its cost has reached 580 thousand dollars.
March boom
On March 11, a collage of 5,000 digital images, created from drawings by South Carolina artist Michael Winckelmann under the pseudonym Beeple, went under the hammer at Christie’s. For a record amount of $ 69 million. NFT’s semi-annual sales through the auction house exceeded $ 100 million.
– Judging by the events of the last 9-10 months, it can be stated that Christie’s somewhat underestimated the volume of the market when it was just deciding whether to sell works of art using NFT. This was even before we put up for auction the work Beeple – Everydays: The First 5000 Days, – says the president of Christie’s in Europe, the Middle East, Russia and India (EMERI) Derk Ball in an interview with Izvestia.
Photo: sohu.com
Beeple artist (real name Michael Winkelmann)
NFT Russian authors are also ready to exhibit at the auction if the quality of their work meets the requirements of the site. So far, Russian artists have not come close to the record set by Beeple, but still managed to check in on specialized platforms.
Izvestia has collected a kind of top-10, representing a list of stars from non-overlapping areas of fine art. Today, NFT platforms remain an experimental field, where street artists, actionists, CG artists and representatives of classical painting find themselves on an equal footing.
From small to record
- One of the pioneers in the crypto art market was a Moscow 3D artist Nikita Replyansky, known by his alias R66. The very first experience with NFT brought a specialist with an impressive list of major partners in his portfolio (among which, for example, the developers of the Kinect Adventures! And Borderlands 2 games, the Tretyakov Gallery and the music group Bring Me the Horizon) more $1.2 thous. (hereinafter, figures are given in dollar terms at the time of sale. – Ed.).
- Video art “Dollar” by the artist Olga Tobreluts – the symbol of the main world currency, which turns into a virus molecule, then into a golden balloon, was appreciated at a crypto auction for more than $2 thous.
- $ 3 thousand paid for a token based on a painting by a Russian artist Dmitry Shorin from the series with girls with planes “Banzai”, which exceeds the cost of a living original.
- Riding a wave of excitement and artist, pioneer of media art Aristarkh Chernyshev sold his first NFT, created on the basis of the work of “personal information organism” – he portrayed a smartphone-leech, which is fueled by the blood of the owner. Token value exceeded $4 thous.
- Art duet PPPS – artists Pavel Pepperstein and Sonya Stereostyrski – created a token for the work “New World”, representing a map of a new blooming world from scraps of fabric. As a result, the NTF price stopped at around $15 thous.
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Photo: artmoskovia.ru
Art group PPSS (Pavel Pepperstein and Sonya Stereostyrski) NFT-work “New World”
- Has worked, among other things, on the creation of the video games Cyberpunk 2077 and Valorant designer Evgeny Zubkov (aka Frm46) from Rostov-on-Don exhibited several works in NFT format. The very first and cheapest lot – CryptoGop – was sold for $1.5 thous.and the most successful is Pandora’s Box, for more than 10 thous.
- Another Russian specialist from the world of video games Oleg Vdovenko helped out on NFT over $23 thous., of which almost a quarter ($ 4.5 thousand) – for one job. At the same time, in March, at the peak of the general wave of large sales, the animator left the crypto platforms, admitting that trading was too stressful.
- World famous Russian art group AES + F (it consists of four artists – Tatyana Arzamasova, Lev Evzovich, Evgeny Svyatsky and Vladimir Fridkes) ten years ago they created a video installation Allegoria Sacra, and in 2021 they divided it into fragments and turned into tokens. Just one piece – almost $27 thous. In August, the artists announced that they would create a large-scale art project “Turandot-2070” based on the NFT. In addition to the owner, the mechanism of the work, depending on the lunar cycle and the geographic location of the viewer, will be written into it.
- The artist was one of the first to react to the trend Painted Lampas, he is Arseny Pyzhenkov. In March, he put up a photo of his work at the Chirkeyskaya HPP in Dagestan for a crypto auction in the form of a token and sold for about $ 28 thousand In October, already for $55 thous. an anonymous buyer acquired an exclusive NFT duck of his authorship for the Waves Ducks blockchain game. The calligraphy duck is called LUCK & WISDOM – “Luck and Wisdom”.
- Petersburg duet 404.zero (Alexander Letsius and Kristina Karpysheva), well-known representatives of Russian digital art, in cooperation with Collab, sold a digital image of Mars Miners as an NFT object (infinitely changing according to the author’s algorithms, which took several years to create) for $86 thous. However, it is not entirely correct to attribute this deal to the NFT market, since the object was purchased at a charity auction and not for cryptocurrency.
Riddle for Wright Clickers
It is noteworthy that the largest deals took place at the peak of the trend on NFT – in the first half of 2021. Towards the end of the year, the price of tokens from celebrities of different profiles is noticeable fell… For example, one of the works of the singer Grimes from the general collection of NFT was resold for $ 1.2 thousand – with an initial cost of 7.5 thousand.
In addition, although NFT is accepted by an increasingly wider audience as part of reality, it does not become more tangible from this. Simply put – the question of why to collect tokens and what to do with them remains open for many. NFT owners even coined the term right-clicker mentality – the mentality of people who click on the right mouse button. That is, those who copy works sold at crypto auctions in various ways, including avatars for thousands of dollars. So far, in quantitative terms, right-clickers are clearly winning.
Photo: instagram.com/niftygateway
Singer Grimes NFT Video
Australian programmer Jeff Huntley decided to prove in practice that they were right: he collected thousands of images sold in the format of non-fungible tokens and made them public. The result is a “billion dollar torrent” weighing 17 terabytes. With his art project (as Huntley called the action), he wanted to demonstrate that connoisseurs of tokens spent a lot on ordinary pictures that can be copied in a couple of clicks.
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