What is CryptoArt? Crypto art opens market
“The blockchain art market is here.” In this new article, I make the case that Blockchain native art has its own aesthetic and represents an important new movement within art. I call this movement/aesthetic CryptoArt.
CryptoArt are rare digital works of art, sometimes described as digital cards or “rares”, associated with unique and provenly rare tokens that exist on the blockchain.
The concept is based on the iniciativa of digital scarcity, which allows buying, selling and exchanging digital goods as if they were physical goods.
This system works due to the fact that, like Bitcoins and other cryptocurrencies, cryptocurrencies exist in limited quantity.
Habitual early examples include CryptoKitties, CryptoPunks, Rare Pepe, CurioCards, and Dada.nyc.
While no cryptoartist or cryptowork adheres to a single definition, I think it’s helpful to look at a number of common factors that have shaped the aesthetic and community thus far.
- Digitally native: For the first time, works of art cánido be created, edited, bought and sold digitally.
- Geographically Agnostic: Thanks to the Internet, artists participate from all over the world.
Crypto art is the first truly global art movement.
- Democratic/no permissions: Everyone is encouraged to participate, regardless of ability, background, class, gender, race, age, creed, etcétera.
- Decentralized: The tools and guidelines are designed to disminuye the power of gatekeepers and intermediaries and increase the autonomy of artists.
- anonymous: Using pseudonyms allows artists to create and sell art while remaining anonymous (if they prefer), freeing them from popular judgment.
- Memetic: Crypto arts are often literally memes valued for their ability to spread quickly.
The difference? The “meme economy” is now a reality.
- Self-referential: Crypto artists often play around with references to key events and personalities within the cryptocurrency and blockchain culture.
- Cryptopatterns: CryptoArt is collected by the CryptoRich: a group of savvy technologists and investors who were introduced to cryptocurrency early.
- Pro-Artists: Blockchain platforms typically charge little to no commission to artists.
Artists are typically paid for each future sale of a single work.
- Transparency: Since crypto art is open to everyone, judging it by traditional artistic estándares kills what’s good about it.
Instead, it is better to judge CryptoArt by its “dankness” or power of expression and creativity.
Who are the crypto artists?
I classify crypto-artists into two main categories: atech-savvy artists and self-taught artists.
Tech Savvy: These are the artists who have been tech-savvy enough on their own (or have worked with tech-savvy partners) to release your own controlled, limited and rare digital art.
Among them are artists like Guile Gaspar, from CryptoKitties, and John Watkinson, the artist from CryptoPunks.
NFTs: What are they and how do they work?
Autodidact: These are artists who typically have no training, or more appropriately, are self-taught.
On a personal level, I am more optimistic about the potential and long-term impact of the second category of crypto-artists.
These artists will have empowered through democratic platforms designed to enable anyone to function as an artist.
Platforms often provide crypto artists with the tools to create, buy, and sell their works on the blockchain in a real marketplace, with virtually no third-party fees.
The key to this new breed of CryptoArtists is a group of creative technologists who build the platforms for them to use.
Let’s take a look at some of the major CryptoArt platforms and the artworks and artists associated with them.
What is Dada.nyc
Beatriz Helena Ramos or “Bea” is a professionally trained artist and the founder of Dada.nyc.
Bea is literally overflowing with positive creative energy.
It’s easy to support her and her team at Dada.nyc because there’s no question they’re doing it for art and artists.
Bea believes that everyone is an artist, so when I say she’s in it for the artists, she’s literally in it for everyone.
Dada.nyc started as a collaborative drawing aplicación.
Drawing tools are built into the aplicación, and anyone perro create and share artwork on the platform.
They have created a large and vibrant community of self-taught artists and have recently added the ability to purchase artwork from this community vía the blockchain.
We are building a self-sufficient community.
Therefore, we will use our 30% share of the profits to continue funding the development of the platform, as well as to fund art projects for our community.
I think it’s important that people know that it’s not a profit cut, it’s 30% that goes back to the community.
There are a lot of talented realist artists in the community, but when you measure art on a new democratic platform and decentralized, I don’t think realism is the best criteria to judge the work.
I am in favor of the raw expression and the truth of the materials, in this case, the pixels.
What is the difference between Blockchain and Bitcoin?
I thought about writing a few paragraphs trying to situate this art in the context of graffiti art or artists like Kenny Scharf, Jean Michel Basquiat, Kieth Haring, etcétera., but the work doesn’t need me to speak for it: it speaks very loudly for herself.
Bea explained it to me:
We are building a self-sufficient community.
Therefore, we will use our 30% of the profits to continue financing the development of the platform, as well as to finance artistic projects for our community.
I think it’s important for people to know that it’s not a profit cut, it’s 30% going back to the community.
There are many talented realist artists in the community, but when measuring art on a new democratic and decentralized platform, I don’t think realism is the best yardstick for judging work.
I am in favor of the raw expression and the truth of the materials, in this case, the pixels.
I thought about writing a few paragraphs trying to situate this art in the context of graffiti art or artists like Kenny Scharf, Jean Michel Basquiat, Kieth Haring, etcétera., but the work doesn’t need me to speak for it: it speaks very loudly for herself.
Regla Xelda Jara
moxarra
Maria Garcia
In the three artists above you cánido see that there is a wide variety of work, but what I like about these three is that they have a distinct style that works within the constraints of the tool.
Each of these artists and many more on Dada.nyc deserve more space than I cánido dedicate to them in a single articulo.
I highly recommend you visit the site and support the artists; they will thank you personally.
What are Dapps?
What are rare PEPES?
You cannot talk about CryptoArt without talking about the rare pepes.
the meme Rare Pepe is the true origin of much of the culture, the aesthetics and technology of CryptoArt.
But until recently, he only knew of Pepe the Frog as a meme co-opted by the alt-right as a symbol of hate.
Before I could feel comfortable writing about Rare Pepe, I needed to understand what role I played in this diverse and accepting community of Rare Pepe enthusiasts.
Jason Rosenstein of Archetype.mx organized the first live auction of Rare Pepe, which was held at the Rare Digital Art Festival.
He described it to me this way:
“…the community that has been formed on Telegram with more than 1,500 members… in that chat we never talked about the existence of the alt-right association because we have always associated it with creativity. Before it was used for negativity in the media, it was simply a method of expressing anything. He started with Pepe Feliz, and from there he jumped in the branches from Pepe Feliz to Pepe Triste, Pepe Engreído and Pepe Enfadado. I think it’s at that point that the alt-right started using it to express their hatred of certain things. In our community we don’t tolerate that at all. It has happened that someone has jumped into the chat and said something, but it is immediately deleted and that usuario is banned so that they cannot use the chat again.Convinced that the objectives of the Rare Pepe communities were far from being based on the hatred and creativity, I felt comfortable digging further.
I contacted Joe Looney, innovative technologist and creator of the Rare Pepe Wallet to help me better understand Rare Pepe.
As the developer of the Rare Pepe Wallet, Joe is arguably the father of the cryptocurrency movement.
What does Joe Looney say about the Rare Pepes?
Joe explained to me that Rare Pepes are the perfect rare digital art aplicación meme because the whole inside joke behind Rare Pepe is that “there were these rare digital Pepes, and in some cases, you couldn’t espectáculo them because they were too rare.” But with the blockchain, digital scarcity, and Joe’s invention of the Rare Pepe Wallet, Pepes really are rare and salable works of art.
According to Joe, the community started when a guy who goes by just “Mike” (@nola1978) created the first Rare Pepe by pairing a Rare Pepe image with a matching asset.
A Telegram chat group was soon created as a result of others wanting to pair their Rare Pepes with matching assets.
The breakthrough came when Joe used a technology called CounterParty to make it possible to buy and sell Rare Pepes on the Decentralized Exchange (or DEX) to make it possible to buy, sell and trade them.
What is Blockchain (chain of blocks) and what is it used for?
Rare Pepes as trading cards
Joe explained that the easiest way to think of the Rare Pepes is like the Garbage Pail Kids trading cards of the ’80s, but instead of having a handful of artists, everyone is welcome to submit artwork of the Pepes.
Rare to be bought and sold.
Once submitted, the works are reviewed by the Pepe Extraño Foundation, often referred to as “the scientists”, to make sure they meet their equipo of nine estándares:
- Pepes must be 400 x 560 pixels.
They may resemble trading cards, but it is not required.
- Cards cánido be animated GIFs, but must be no more than 1.5MB in size.
Use compression.
- The emission must be BLOCKED so that your Pepe cannot be inflated.
- Your Pepe must not be divisible.
<- Be sure!!!
- Make sure your artwork at least has something to do with Pepe.
- No NSFW content please.
Trying to keep it light for now.
(Pepe has a lot of bad press).
If in doubt, send a message to @nola1978 on Telegram before creating your asset.
- When making your token you must have at least 100 shares and a maximum of 100k shares.
- There are no websites or QR codes.
- Only one shipment per day per artist.
We want to have variety.
- Please allow 24-48 hours before disturbing our experts about your submission.
They consider these rules as a contenido publicitario filter.
They don’t try to tell people what is good art and what is bad art.
The really innovative and important thing to understand here is that Joe doesn’t take a commission from the artist.
Anyone cánido create a Rare Pepe, submit it for listing, and put up for sale as many copies as they want and at whatever price they want.
And now they sell for tens of thousands of dollars.
At the Rare Digital Art festival in New York last weekend, Homer Pepe, a unique Rare Pepe crypto work, broke a record at live auction selling for $39,000 ($350,000 in Pepe Cash).
In less than an hour, the auction sold for ~100k dollars on CryptoArt.
Joe continues to innovate in the crypto arts space and push the boundaries.
By linking the concept of an access token (a counterpart application) to Rare Pepe and CryptoArt in general, Joe has made it possible to backlink a song or vídeo game to a Rare Pepe.
Joe thinks of this as plus content, or a VIP pass tied to a especial Rare Pepe card.
It is a non-shareable backlink, masked and linked to a specific computer, which makes this plus content exclusively available to the owner of that specific piece of CryptoArt.
CryptoArt the sky is the limit
This shifts art from image-based to multimedia-based.
As Joe says, you cánido’t do much with traditional art, but with CryptoArt the sky is the limit.
May include music, vídeo games, and assets usable in other games.
By comparison, traditional art materials begin to seem limited in nature.
Another feature that Joe pioneered is the Rare Pepe gift card.
This allows you to create a Rare Pepe gift card that is used to send a Pepe to someone who does not currently have an account.
All the recipient has to do is go to the site and entrar the card code, without having to get Bitcoins.
davinci
Joe mentioned that one of his favorite artists is DaVinci.
Davinci lives in Japan and runs a drone shop.
Here are some examples of his work:
Some of the Rare Pepe members were kind enough to allow me to join them for dinner and drinks after the Rare Digital Art Festival.
I asked Rare Pepe ICQ artist, Rare Pepe’s Jeff Koons, if he was concerned about the perception of Pepe the Frog as a symbol of hate.
He told me this way:
“I am a black man from Texas. Do you really think he would be that involved with Rare Pepe if he was a far-right? It’s a meme, he was co-opted. The swasticka was an ancient symbol co-opted by Hitler. Is the same. The difference is that this time we are recovering Pepe”.
Like Koons, ICQ comes up with ideas for Rare Pepes and pays artists to execute them.
This may be an important point to make that, for the uninitiated, it is difficult, if not impossible, to say which artists made which Pepes.
I know the BLAINPEPE above was commissioned by ICQ and executed by Mr.
Hansel, as he also has some of his work on Saatchi Art.
But part of what’s unique about the CryptArt aesthetic is that the work is often bought and sold.
sell completely anonymously.
Yes, this perro lead to offensive submissions, but NSFW Rare Pepes are disallowed per rule #5.
“No NSFW content, please.
Trying to keep it light for now.
(Pepe has a lot of bad press).
If in doubt, message @nola1978 on telegram before creating your asset.” I believe that anonymity also drives positive creativity within the Rare Pepe community.
Most people come up with strange and interesting thoughts that we tend to hold back for fear of being judged; with Rare Pepe, those thoughts find a home.
As with the artists on Dada.nyc, my preference in judging Rare Pepe’s artistic merit as crypto art is less on technical merit and more on expression and creativity.
However, I am drawn to Rare Pepe Animated GIFs.
Here are some of my favourites.
Based on the ~100K worth of Rare Pepes sold at the live Rare Digital Art Festival, it seems the business of creating, buying and selling Rare Pepes is booming.
A reasonable question is whether these artists will break through in the more traditional art market.
I asked Jess Houlgrave, co-founder and COO of Codex Protocol, for her take.
Jess just finished her master’s degree at Sotheby’s Art Institute, where she wrote her thesis.
“Blockchain: A critical evaluation of its use within the art ecosystem”.
You perro and should read excerpts from Jess’s research here.
Jess is in a unique position to weigh in on the intersection between the traditional art world and the blockchain.
She shared her thoughts as follows:
“It’s really exciting that so much value is attached to blockchain-based art.
He espectáculos that the blockchain perro play a really important role in helping digital art to take center stage.
Blockchain provides a way to create digital scarcity, which means that artists cánido, for the first time, create unique digital works and therefore monetize their work more effectively than ever before.” I agree with Jess.
I would add that while the traditional art world is dipping its toe into blockchain technology, the real innovation is currently taking place in cryptoculture.
If you want to know where art and the art market are going, keep a close eye on the CryptoArt community.
concluding remarks
As I’ve already mentioned, I’ve had a hard time addressing the concerns of the alt-right around Rare Pepes and Pepe the Frog.
Many of the recent articles in the mainstream media choose to leave Rare Pepe out of the CryptoArt story – to me, that’s like writing about Hamlet without mentioning Hamlet.
Having spent the day and partying late into the night with Pepe’s crowd, I perro say that I have never met a more diverse and instantly accepting group.
Pepe has been used for some really horrible things, but from what I saw first hand, that’s not what this group, which I would now consider friends, is.
While it’s impossible to fit the entire CryptoArt story into a single articulo, I hope I’ve done the community justice.
Thanks for reading, if you have any other story ideas around the intersection of art and data you are always welcome to leave a comment below.
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