{"id":434,"date":"2021-03-25T08:56:38","date_gmt":"2021-03-25T00:56:38","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.atelierauction.com\/globalupdates\/?p=434"},"modified":"2021-03-22T12:09:30","modified_gmt":"2021-03-22T04:09:30","slug":"nfts-are-creating-the-opposite-of-everything-theyre-meant-to-fix","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.atelierauction.com\/globalupdates\/artist\/nfts-are-creating-the-opposite-of-everything-theyre-meant-to-fix\/","title":{"rendered":"NFTs are Creating the Opposite of Everything They\u2019re Meant to Fix"},"content":{"rendered":"

In the moments after\u00a0Beeple\u2019s $69 million sale at Christie\u2019s<\/a>, the artist was sitting surrounded by his family and taking stock of the historic moment. He removed his glasses and rubbed his eyes with emotional disbelief as he said with his voice breaking, \u201cI think this means that digital art his here to stay.\u201d Making more money than you or your family could have ever dreamed of in the short space of four months would make any of us emotional. But the extraordinary moment probably doesn\u2019t mean what\u00a0Beeple<\/a>\u00a0thinks it means. The artist is hardly alone in drawing the conclusion that the big number means digital art or\u00a0NFTs<\/a>\u00a0are suddenly at the center of our culture.<\/p>\n

It turns out the NFT craze has many parallels to the art world. After even a few short days in the aftermath of the sale, we can already see that NFTs are creating effects that are hilariously and tragically the opposite of the utopian fantasies so many have placed upon them. NFTs are not democratizing art; they\u2019re making a very few artists very rich. NFTs have not given artists new ways to earn money from the financial exploitation of their works by collectors; Beeple\u2019s buyer has already made enough off a previous bundle of purchases to be able to buy this work from those profits. And NFTs are not creating more transparency in the art world; the buyer has been giving interviews without actually revealing his identity. All three of these points were highlighted when the buyer, Metakovan, came forward on Friday.<\/p>\n

The biggest problem with what happened at Christie\u2019s last Thursday is that the buyers (and the under-bidder too) were paying with soft money. We learned on Friday that Metakovan and his sidekick, Twobadour, had already succeeded by using another token called a B20 to explode the $2.2 million in nominal value they spent on a group of other Beeple works by a hundred-fold. That CDO-like syndicated bundle has had a total market capitalization of $200 million. (It fluctuates.)<\/p>\n

In the highly volatile and mercurial world of crypto, there\u2019s no reason to believe the two masked alchemists cannot turn Beeple\u2019s masterwork into something with a nominal value a hundred times higher. After Leonardo\u2019s\u00a0Salvador Mundi<\/em>\u00a0sold also at Christie\u2019s for $450 million, many wondered aloud whether we might see a billion-dollar sale for a single work. In a weekend, the pair from Singapore raised the very real possibility they might already own a digital work that might reach a liquidity value of nearly $7 billion. (It\u2019s worth noting here that the aftermath of the Leonardo sale saw more than a few unpleasant blowbacks for Christie\u2019s in an endless supply of conspiracy theories.)<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Buying in crypto currency is the opposite of democratizing the art market. It replaces one elite group, those with excess fiat currency, with another elite group like Metakovan, those with an excess of crypto. Metakovan\u2019s ability to re-tokenize the work also violates another precept of the NFT revolution, that the artist will benefit from future sales. Instead of selling, the Singaporean crypto investors were able to create value around Beeple\u2019s work without necessarily including him. (Though\u00a0this post which speculates on Metakovan\u2019s identity<\/a>\u00a0also suggests Beeple is a 2% holder of the B20 tokens.) It was nice that they took some of the profit from that venture and put it back into another Beeple work but it hardly lives up to the promised disruption.<\/p>\n

\n
\n
\n
\"Beeple,<\/div>\n<\/div>
Beeple\u2019s\u00a0Everydays: The First 5,000 Days<\/em>\u00a0(2021), a non-fungible token that sold at Christie\u2019s.<\/span>CHRISTIE’S<\/cite><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n

Although last week\u2019s sale took place under the aegis of Christie\u2019s, there was little evidence that anyone involved in the art market actually participated. Many proponents of NFTs mistakenly believe that value in the art market is manufactured by elite auction houses and art galleries. Yet the runaway bidding for Beeple at Christie\u2019s, ten times his previous high sale only a few weeks before (indeed, the whole of Beeple\u2019s market career has played out in only four short months), was clearly a function of the fact that the buyers were bidding at Christie\u2019s. In other words, the NFT market was relying on Christie\u2019s elite, old world reputation to create the very value its proponents decry as Christie\u2019s monopoly.<\/p>\n

It isn\u2019t clear the art world will benefit from this sale, either. The artists who have become successful selling NFTs are a different group from the artists sold at galleries and art fairs. There\u2019s a gold rush taking place right now as artists try to cash in on NFTs. So far that hasn\u2019t happened. It isn\u2019t likely to happen simply because the buyers of NFTs don\u2019t really seem to be interested in the artists galleries and auction houses sell.<\/p>\n

\n
\n
\n
\"A<\/div>\n<\/div>
Beeple:\u00a0Illestrater<\/em>, 2020.<\/span>COURTESY THE ARTIST<\/cite><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n

Art dealers have wondered for more than a decade now what it will take to get Silicon Valley\u2019s richest to start buying art. Over the weekend, venture capitalist Marc Andreessen and his wife Laura Arrillaga, who are among San Francisco\u2019s most significant art collectors, gathered on Clubhouse with Pace Gallery\u2019s Marc Glimcher who has long had an outpost in area. Glimcher isn\u2019t worried about losing Andreessen as a client. That\u2019s because it is hard to see Andreessen actually buying NFTs with any real passion. He\u2019s simply too old to identify with these virtual objects as important cultural possessions. That doesn\u2019t mean a generation of techno-rich entrepreneurs younger than he won\u2019t. But the artists they will buy won\u2019t have need of galleries or auction houses. They will sell directly to their buyers. That weeping you hear is a generation of art dealers and collectors seeing the future buyers of their works evaporate.<\/p>\n

Finally, the NFT craze has unleashed bizarre wave of copyright theft where anonymous persons have been taking the Tweets and memes created by others\u2014or in more than one art world case, the work of Banksy\u2014and minting them as NFTs to sell. Once minted NFTs can provide the transparency of ownership that protects the owners\u2019 anonymity; however, the loophole in the system has appeared very quickly and that\u2019s the point of attachment. This last development is perhaps the cruelest turn from a technology that at its core promises authenticity.<\/p>\n

None of this is to suggest that NFTs are inherently bad. They\u2019re just not necessarily relevant to art as we know it. The road ahead for NFTs is a very long one. The technology shouldn\u2019t be dismissed. But the more we see of how it plays out in real life, the more it replicates all of the ills it was supposed to resolve.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Source:https:\/\/www.artnews.com\/<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In the moments after\u00a0Beeple\u2019s $69 million sale at Christie\u2019s, the artist was sitting surrounded by his family and taking stock of the historic moment. He removed his glasses and rubbed his eyes with emotional disbelief as he said with his voice breaking, \u201cI think this means that digital art his here to stay.\u201d Making more […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":435,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"tdm_status":"","tdm_grid_status":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[5,13,7,4,3],"tags":[115],"class_list":{"0":"post-434","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-artist","8":"category-auction","9":"category-events","10":"category-gallery","11":"category-latest-news","12":"tag-nft"},"yoast_head":"\nNFTs are Creating the Opposite of Everything They\u2019re Meant to Fix - Investable Art Auctioneer<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"In the moments after Beeple\u2019s $69 million sale at Christie\u2019s, the artist was sitting surrounded by his family and taking stock of the historic moment.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.atelierauction.com\/globalupdates\/artist\/nfts-are-creating-the-opposite-of-everything-theyre-meant-to-fix\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"NFTs are Creating the Opposite of Everything They\u2019re Meant to Fix - 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