Digital Art Market – NFT
Carrie Ann Baade’s piece “Power and Dominions”
is on view at Venvi art Gallery.
Many prominent figures are getting involved in selling and buying NFTs. Indian millennial Vignesh Sundaresan, aka MetaKovan, bought an NFT for $69.3 million at a Christie’s auction this year. This NFT was created by artist Mike Winkelmann, aka Beeple. Additionally, Indian celebrity, Amitabh Bachchan, sold a series of NFTs for over nearly a $1 million. Bachchan has digitalized autographed posters of himself, as well as his father’s poems and other personal items.
With non-fungible tokens (NFTs), an original piece of art can be digitalized and sold. Like a physical certificate, an NFT is a digital certificate of authenticity.
Fungibility is the ability of an asset to be exchanged like, how we use U.S. dollars or bitcoins. Non-fungible means, it cannot be used as a currency and instead it is evaluated like a property. Additionally, each non-fungible token is distinctive, and its information is recorded on a block chain.
The unique identity attached to each minted piece of art, consists of multiple strings of numbers and letters stored in block chain storage. Information such as the owner, buyer and date sold are recorded and can be tracked.
In the physical art world, once the artist sells their work, and the art is resold for millions of dollars, the artist does not receive any of that money from the resale. Whereas with NFTs, artists can create their NFT and when it’s sold, the artist gets paid. Then, when the NFT gets resold, the artist receives a percentage from the resale.
To mint your own NFT, first, you need to create a digital asset, this can be a digital art, any physical art digitalized, music, etc.
Next, choose an NFT platform to create an account and sell your NFT. Some examples of the platforms are Mintable, Openspace, SuperRare, Nifty. These are some of the common NFT platforms. Minting your NFT requires certain amount of “gas” to run the algorithm using the computer to generate a code. This gas is charged as gas fees to the person who mints the NFT. You will need cryptocurrency to pay for the fee. The platform will guide you through the process of turning your digital asset into a marketable NFT and let you choose between a fixed price or an auction for selling.
To obtain cryptocurrency, you need a digital wallet. Most people use a wallet called MetaMask and also a cryptocurrency called Ether from the blockchain Ethereum. We can compare a digital wallet to the physical wallet that we carry and cryptocurrency to the dollar notes used.
Although I don’t have much personal experience selling or buying an NFT, I spoke with the artist Carrie Ann Baade, who is showing at Venvi Art Gallery in Tallahassee with a solo show “Twilight Sleep.” She has digitalized a few of her physical works by adding animation and uploading it onto OpenSea marketplace – https://opensea.io/collection/supernaturalbeings Ann Baade’s piece “Power and Dominions” is on view at Venvi art Gallery.
There are still a lot of questions surrounding the NFT industry and as NFT’s become more popular, we will be able to better understand how they fit into the future of the art world.
Brinda Pamulapati, owner/managing director, of Venvi Art Gallery in Tallahassee, can be reached at (850) 322-0965 or visit www.VenviArtGallery.com