Art
Note: Data in this section last updated May 28th, 2022
Art is another popular category of NFT, representing 9% of the total digital art market and ~6% of all NFTs.
Perhaps the most famous example of digital art is Beeple’s Everydays – The First 5,000 Days, a collage of 5,000 digital images that sold for $69M in 2021. The work was notable because it was the first purely digital work sold by a major auction house.
Beeple’s Everydays Sold for $69 Million in 2021
While the sale of Everydays was groundbreaking, it’s likely just the tip of the iceberg, as artists are using the functionality of smart contracts and NFTs to experiment with new designs.
One of the most popular is known as generative art – art made in partnership with a computer.
Unlike traditional art, generative artists don’t directly create their works. Instead, they write a software program that defines an acceptable “universe” of artistic elements such as shapes, colors and basic geometries. When this code is executed, the computer then randomly assembles these elements to create distinct works.
As such, each piece is unique and neither the artist nor the buyer has any idea what it’s going to look like until the process is complete.
This represents an important evolution – while digital artists have long used computers as a medium to make art (much like a painter would use oil or a sculptor clay), generative art takes this a step further and leverages the computer as a co-creator.
Similar to Monet’s impressionism in the late 19th century, Picasso’s cubism in the early 20th and Warhol’s Pop Art in the 60s, many argue that generative art best captures the zeitgeist of our time – one where the line between human and machine is beginning to blur.
One of the most popular platforms for generative art is Art Blocks, which allows artists to create and sell their works. Popular collections include:
Ringers: A series of 1,000 generative art NFTs created by Dmitri Cherniak
Fidenza: A curated collection of 999 works produced by Tyler Hobbs
Chromie Squiggles: An art collection created by Snowfro, a Mexico-city born technologist and generative artist
To date, the platform has recorded over $1B in sales including:
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