One of the main pillars on which a work of art still rests and is coveted is, in addition to its value and importance within its context and discourse, it is the unique meaning it possesses, or everything that can make a piece different from the rest of others.
However, over the years this element has been expanded, reconfigured and also disfigured to speculate in the markets on the possible value, or absence of, in a piece, installation, object art and, recently, digital art.
At the voracious pace set by the market and the latest digital trends, and even though a good part of the population does not know well about terms such as non-fungible tokens or blockchain chains, the NFT trend has accelerated in an unthinkable way during the last two years, reaching the art and art markets.
Among the increasingly frequent problems and speculations about fair payments, royalties and contractual details, the blockchain is projected as a muscle and potential tool to develop and eliminate cumbersome intermediaries within different industries, including luxury, starting by resolving conflicts associated with payments, and even to reach a greater involvement by creators, producers and artists with their audiences or final consumers.
And while not all the voices involved or knowingly are in favor of NFTs, this digital instrument has demonstrated a power beyond one more capricious fad by the great emporiums of the market.
The so-called non-fungible-tokens or NFTs are nothing more than tokens created in a specific Blockchain that have unique and unrepeatable content (let's imagine a digital photograph that cannot be shared, replicated, screenshotted, or anything like that ).
This possibility can be either a work of art, a collectible item or piece, powers in a game, the title deed to a real house, or pretty much anything else we can think of.
Being hosted on Blockchains such as the Binance Smart Chain cryptocurrencies, Bitcoin or Ethereum, these tokens cannot be duplicated or counterfeited, so our purchase can be assured as far as its original is concerned.
And while the experiment was promising, curious and fascinating two years ago, in July 2021 it alarmed financial analysts, when during an auction at the famous auction house, Christie's, remotely, without the already iconic scene of a room fills and the final hammer blow, a batch of digital image collages titled Every Day: The First 5,000 Days, fetched $69 million, paid for in Etherum equivalent.
An NTF of John Lennon's "Magical Mystery Tour" Afghan Coat and a print of "Hey Jude" notes written by Paul McCartney the "Lennon Connection: The NFT Collection" auction which includes prized Beatles and John Lennon memorabilia from the collection Julian Lennon's private, Beverly Hills, California, on January 25, 2022. VALERIE MACON (AFP via Getty Images)
It was the same author of the piece, Beeple, who described the NFTs as a potential speculative bubble, since, as soon as he changed his Ethers to dollars, he was surprised by the volatility: “I am not even remotely a crypto purist”, assured the digital artist .
Sports clubs, the music industry, the artistic ecosystem that has been trying their luck with digital art or Net Art for decades, and all that susceptible segment of collecting have been the first to take risks with NFTs.
But the luxury industry has not been left behind.
Recently, the Italian fashion house Dolce & Gabbana launched a very lucrative NFT sale, Collezione Genesi, which raised more than six million dollars in a hybrid physical/NFT model, composed of nine pieces, uniting the physical aspect of fashion and the metaphysical aspects of NFTs.
What do interested parties “really” buy?
The physical item and the NFT together.
Bloomberg (Bloomberg via Getty Images)
Givency, Gucci, and Louis Vuitton are also on the NFT route, albeit in a more “traditional” way, by making available NFTs based on graphic designs from a collection, a film featuring their fashion, and a video game they launched, respectively. .
This experiment only generated $159,000 for Givency and $25,000 for Gucci's NFT film.
One of the critical voices within the scope and possible scenarios around art and NFTs has been the British musician, producer and creator of ambient music, Brian Eno, who envisions "a world flooded with speculators and easy money, because world governments, reluctant to make real structural changes that endanger the status quo, have decided that the solution to any problem is to print more money.
That is probably the reason that the stock market shoots up when an emergency like covid occurs, because speculators know that a new emergency means more money and that much of it will end up in their hands.
From the first tweet in history, to the flying cat meme, passing through iconic Time covers, or the first NFT album, some analysts see the arrival of this intangible instrument as the prelude to the reimagining of money, where the still incipient semantic fields around the metaverse and cryptocurrencies will define the course of things.
We asked a financial analyst and an art curator to draw the future of NFTs in the art world.
How much is the most expensive one could get? How can it add to the fortunes of the artist, the buyer or the heritage of a museum? Speculation or an instrument of expression of the new times?