How to Take the Best Pictures to Sell Your House
"It's really a lot simpler than yous think." It'south a Tuesday afternoon, and somewhat to my surprise, I'm on the phone to Paris Hilton, who is graciously explaining the world of NFTs.
Hilton is many things – a reality star, an heiress, an unlikely lockdown fitness guru who uses designer handbags instead of weights. But until now, she has never been considered a significant role player in the art world. When artists accept acknowledged her, often they've done and then to fetishise her image. In 2008, Damien Hirst bought a portrait of her by the artist Jonathan Yeo, in which her body is constructed from collaged images cut from porn magazines.
All the same in the past year she's become a surreal figurehead in the NFT scene: a world flush with crypto dollars and high on a promise to transform the worlds of art and commerce. When we speak, Hilton has just returned from a bitcoin briefing in Miami, where customers paid up to $25,000 for VIP tables at the opening party to watch her DJ in a pair of diamanté-encrusted headphones. "NFT stands for non-fungible token, a digital token that is redeemable for a digital slice of fine art," she explains. "You lot tin can have it on your computer server or your telephone. I have these screens in my house where I display them."
Certain enough, at Hilton's Beverly Hills mansion at that place are screens displaying NFTs she made in collaboration with the digital artist Blake Kathryn. These include a video of a chihuahua on acme of a rotating ionic column (a tribute to her deceased pet Tinkerbell) and an animated cocky-portrait of Hilton as a sparkling CGI Barbie floating in the clouds, a piece she's called Iconic Crypto Queen, and which she sold in April for more than $1m.
Hilton starting time started investing in cryptocurrency in 2016. "I became friends with the founders of Ethereum," she says. (Ethereum produces ether, the currency in which the bulk of NFTs are traded.) Since then she'due south thrown herself into collecting crypto art, and owns more than than 150 NFTs.
To advocates of the NFT, the applied science offers a revolutionary new way of selling fine art, and of circumventing snooty cultural gatekeepers whose resistance to a crypto future seems every bit square as the 19th-century Parisian art world'south disdain for impressionism. In this context, the relevance of Hilton'due south brand to the NFT movement makes sense. Pink, jewel-encrusted, and openly motivated past being equally rich and famous as humanly possible, she'southward a far cry from the blazon of person whose work is typically exhibited in blue-chip galleries or hung in booths at art fairs.
Notwithstanding Hilton'due south endorsement may also exist ammunition for those who view the NFT as just another depressing example of the speculative logic of finance monopolising taste. To detractors, from critic Waldemar Januszczak to artist David Hockney, the NFT marketplace is a habitation for morally bankrupt, environmentally vandalistic money-grabbers whose creations barely qualify every bit art.
While about of u.s.a. are however trying to remember what "fungible" means, a boxing is under way to ascertain how NFTs are understood. Are they a vital cultural product that tells us something profound nigh digital consumerism? Or are they just the latest cynical style to make absurd amounts of coin?
A motley crew of celebrities have tried their hand at selling digital art, including Snoop Dogg, Lindsay Lohan and John Cleese. In July, it was estimated that sales of NFTs in the first half of 2022 rose by more than $2bn (£1.47bn) – a tendency that prompted Christie's and Sotheby's to host their ain NFT auctions and that is credited with driving contemporary art sales to an all-time high. But only a tiny proportion of the gain of fine art NFTs have ended upwards in the banking concern accounts of the galleries that take, in addition to auction houses, traditionally taken the lion's share of art-market profits.
In March, the crypto firm Injective Protocol paid $95,000 for Morons, a physical artwork past Banksy depicting an auctioneer selling a framed picture bearing the words: "I can't believe you lot morons actually purchase this shit." They and then burned the picture before selling a digital token of the piece of work for $380,000. The consequence was a marketing ploy, designed to stoke outrage, drum upwardly publicity and turn a profit. Yet the symbolism was potent: digital art is here to replace its physical forebear, and its coming supremacy should be reflected by a higher price tag.
In essence, an NFT is a digital certificate of buying, almost e'er bought and sold using cryptocurrency, to which any digital file – a jpeg image file, a video, a song – can be fastened. That Hilton is able to display Iconic Crypto Queen in her home, despite having sold it, is role of the NFT's appeal – and the challenge it poses to the established business model for trading and accessing art. With a simple Google search, anybody can find and download the file associated with an NFT for nada, and store it on their phone or figurer, but just the owner has the correct to sell information technology. Each NFT is unique, and all transactions are logged on the blockchain, a type of database invented in 2008 for the purpose of recording the move of cryptocurrency.
Different the commercial gallery business model, NFTs are designed to cut out the need for fine art dealers, enabling artists to trade directly online, typically via specialist auction sites. Crucially, in contrast to the contemporary art world, there is no "vetting" of collectors – a practise intended to finish the most speculative buyers flipping artworks by speedily reselling them at a turn a profit. Anybody can buy an NFT, and prices, so often a thing of mystery in high-terminate commercial galleries, are listed every bit a matter of public record. Every time an NFT is resold, its creator also makes a profit – an inbuilt royalty arrangement missing from the concrete art earth, where artists often feel as if they have been shafted when their work is resold on the secondary market.
A model for trading and sharing art, congenital on the principles of financial transparency, royalties and easy access for all may sound egalitarian. The reality has been rather dissimilar. As soon as it became apparent that well-nigh anything digital could exist labelled as art and sold, the circus rolled into town.
In March, Everydays: The Starting time 5000 Days, a collage of previous artworks past a forty-yr-old American named Mike Winkelmann, better known equally Beeple, sold for $69.3m at Christie's New York. Later that, Kate Moss sold a gif of herself for more $17,000. Jack Dorsey, CEO of Twitter, sold an image of the first ever tweet for $ii.9m. A Brooklyn motion picture manager managed to sell an audio file of his own farts for $85. Dominic Cummings even threatened to use the technology confronting Boris Johnson, by releasing what he said was evidence of regime malpractice in the course of an NFT.
Along the style, the market became gratuitously inflated. Bidders at the summit end included Vignesh Sundaresan, a blockchain entrepreneur who bought Beeple'due south $69m NFT. A considerable number of small-time enthusiasts were also buying at the affordable end of the market, keen to celebrate the technology by investing in blockchain art. It didn't take long earlier the bubble outburst. By May, daily sales of NFTs had dropped past 60%. Crypto art's reputation has too taken a knock because of its awful environmental track record. (The annual free energy consumption of Ethereum is estimated to equal that of Iceland.)
Despite this, advocates still believe NFTs tin can mount a challenge to the monopoly on trading art held by commercial galleries, and even create a futurity where physical artworks are replaced past their digital counterparts. Every bit Hilton puts it: "There are paintings out there that are $100m or more, but if y'all recall about it, information technology'south really only sheet with pigment."
I n the beginning, before the circus pitched up, there were nerds. Inevitably, because this is the internet, at that place were also cats. CryptoKitties, to exist precise, is an online game launched in 2017, enabling players to trade and "breed" unique cartoon felines, sold as NFTs, using blockchain technology. Although the beginning NFT was created by a man named Kevin McCoy in 2014, CryptoKitties attracted attention and money, with some cats trading for hundreds of thousands of dollars. During 2020, as cryptocurrencies boomed and the pandemic accelerated our transformation into a species of screen-obsessed zombies, interest in NFTs quickly picked up pace. Equally a consequence, the value of work past a relatively small number of artists already on the scene rocketed.
Among them was Trevor Jones, a 51-year-old painter who lives in Edinburgh. You've probably never heard of Jones, but he's the almost successful NFT artist working in the UK. He started making NFTs in 2019. "Five years agone, I was struggling to pay the mortgage," he tells me. "I went from having to borrow money from friends to pay the bills to making $4m in a twenty-four hours."
Jones has fabricated a name for himself combining painting with digital technology, often producing pastiches of famous artworks with a crypto twist. In 2020, Bitcoin Bull – an animated painting of a Picasso-inspired bull, decorated with bitcoin logos and Twitter birds – was bought by a prominent crypto collector named Pablo Rodriguez-Fraile for $55,555.55.
Jones is warm, unguarded, and stunned by his rapid ascent. "I grew up in a little logging community," he says of his childhood in western Canada, a identify he describes equally "crude". "When I was 25, a friend of mine concluded up getting into a fight at a bar and was killed." He left soon afterward, eventually settling in Edinburgh, where he worked at the metropolis'southward Hard Rock Cafe as a waiter and later on as a director.
Jones tells me almost the mental health crisis he suffered in his early 30s. "My girlfriend and I broke upwards and information technology kind of all came crashing downward. At that point, information technology sounds cliched, simply I decided I needed to find something to save me."
He set his heart on condign an artist and "begged" his way on to an art foundation form at Leith School of Art, which he followed with a caste at the Academy of Edinburgh.
Things began to expect up for Jones in 2012, when he had the idea of incorporating QR codes into his art, painting the scannable barcodes in Mondrian-similar colours on sail. Scanning the paintings takes viewers through to an online gallery, where anybody tin can upload their piece of work. "People were laughing at me at the time," he says. While gallery audiences turned their noses upwards, he gained a new following online, one that would plow out to have deep pockets.
In 2019, Jones began working with animators to plow his paintings into short videos that he sold as NFTs. Amid his most successful works is Bitcoin Affections, an NFT based on Bernini's baroque masterpiece The Ecstasy of Saint Teresa, which he sold in 2022 for the equivalent of more than $3m (all of Jones's NFTs are bought using cryptocurrency). In Bernini's marble sculpture, a nun has been stabbed in the heart by an angel with a spear. She leans backwards, overcome by the sublime ecstasy of being penetrated by a heavenly body. When the arrow pierces the heart of Jones'due south nun, she bleeds bitcoin.
To sell Bitcoin Angel, Jones used a website called Corking Gateway, one of a number of online auction sites designed for trading NFTs that are now flooded with aspiring crypto artists. I dedicated an afternoon to scrolling through the lots, each one flashing and jiggling in the promise of attracting the attention of collectors. I saw gifs of muffins transforming into dogs, spinning trainers, sycophantic portraits of Elon Musk and an affluence of naked, big-boobed cyborgs. The art critic Dean Kissick described the male-dominated NFT scene as "Etsy for guys", and on this evidence it's like shooting fish in a barrel to see why. Bated from the headline-grabbing sales, Nifty Gateway provides a platform for aspirational entrepreneurs and hobbyists, who practise their arts and crafts on computers rather than knotting macrame found hangers.
While those – like Jones – who successfully rode the NFT moving ridge were busy counting their crypto dollars, over the by year the conventional fine art world has suffered a turn down. During the pandemic, with audiences unable to physically attend exhibitions and fairs, fine art dealers have struggled to make online viewing rooms interesting or lucrative. As a upshot, global sales of art cruel by 22%. To rub salt in that wound, millions of crypto dollars were exchanging hands for a natively digital art form. "The technology is designed against the existing art earth," says Noah Davis, a specialist at Christie'southward New York. "It'southward an fine art form that doesn't need a gallery."
It was Davis who helped to sell Beeple's $69m NFT, the first piece of crypto art ever listed past a major sale house. He views his own bear on as pivotal: "I introduced NFTs to the Christie's audition and thereby the world," he says. The artwork was sold during an online auction in March that took two weeks to close. Bidding opened at $100, and inside an hr that figure had risen to $1m – the result of a vast number of bids all happening digitally. "I've never seen anything and then spectacular. You lot can't bid that rapidly at auction unless y'all merely shout out: 'A million bucks,'" Davis says, "and that's impossible to exercise online. So all that bidding had to happen in increments and manually.
"I await at my life equally pre-Beeple and post-Beeple," he adds. "The same way the globe thinks virtually before Jesus Christ and after. Beeple is kind of my Jesus."
In the months since, Christie's has continued to cash in on NFTs. In May, information technology achieved $16.9m for nine pixellated cartoon characters from the CryptoPunks series, early on examples of NFT art that have become sought-afterwards collectibles. Christie's has too attempted to unite the crypto and modern fine art markets. This leap, it hosted a sale of digital artworks made past Andy Warhol in the 1980s. The images, which had been recovered from floppy disks and transformed into NFTs, include drawings, made on the artist'southward Commodore Amiga estimator, of bananas, flowers, and of a Campbell's soup can that lone sold for more than $1m.
In general, the commercial gallery world has been understandably chary nearly adopting engineering designed to circumvent it. Backside the scenes, yet, a number of galleries take attempted to woo Jones. He has declined their advances. "What tin can a commercial gallery do for me?" he asks. "Having a gallery exhibition before, I worked a year creating paintings, I paid for all the framing, the overheads for the studio. I had the paintings delivered to the commercial gallery. I may or may non sell, the gallery takes 45 to 55% commission, and they might pay out a calendar month, six weeks, ii months afterwards." And now? "I sell something and 3 minutes later I've got the money in my digital wallet."
A t times, the divide between the ii art worlds seems more profound than a difference in business model: it's an all-out culture clash. "Few of these cyber-millionaires could tell the dorsum of a Rembrandt from the front," wrote art critic Waldemar Januszczak. "There is no challenge whatsoever in NFT art," conceptual fine art collector Pedro Barbosa told the New York Times, arguing that the ideas behind NFTs are often derivative, having "already been explored by artists similar Josef Albers, László Moholy-Nagy, and Marcel Duchamp". David Hockney branded NFTs "silly little things" for "crooks and swindlers" – a curious accusation from an artist happy to embrace and monetise novel digital technology. Since 2009, Hockney has been doing a roaring trade in souped-up iPhone and iPad drawings.
Jones tells me that the crypto faithful, who, like Hilton, ardently believe that NFTs are the future of art, at present use the dusty epithet "the legacy art world" to refer to their physical rivals.
As a painter, Jones is unusual amongst NFT artists. On occasion, this has allowed him the opportunity to sell the original painting on which an NFT is based, too as the NFT. Pulling off this kind of double sale, however, must be handled carefully. Charging more for a painting than an NFT, and thus valuing physical art more highly than digital art, could provoke the ire of the crypto crowd. When Jones sold Bitcoin Bull to Rodriguez-Fraile, he also sold the original painting to the 2nd-place bidder. In order non to offend his fans, he priced the painting at $55,000 – $555.55 less than the NFT.
A handful of established contemporary artists, notably those who have form when information technology comes to explicitly courtship headlines and farthermost wealth, accept tried their hand at making NFTs – well-nigh prominently Damien Hirst, who released the project The Currency in July. Hirst put 10,000 NFTs up for sale, each respective to a unique spot painting, for $2,000 a slice. Merely there is a take hold of: later on two months, the collector must decide if they wish to keep the NFT or the physical fine art work. Whichever one they don't cull volition be destroyed, forcing the owner to adventure on which version will be more valuable in the future.
The most shocking attribute of the NFT to the art intelligentsia is its brazen entanglement with finance. Trading art has ever been a pastime of the wealthy. Much of what counts for art history consists of flattering portrayals of the rich and powerful, and artists take long been expected to perform what Tom Wolfe chosen the Art Mating Ritual – attracting the interest of wealthy patrons and conservative institutions, while simultaneously presenting equally Bohemians and renegades. Nevertheless with the NFT, the distinction betwixt art and nugget seems to take disappeared. In place of the curated exhibition is the sale website; symbols of the market have seeped into the artful language of the art itself. Prices, not ideas, boss.
Despite the promise of "art for everyone", the final destination of the NFT might not really be art. Art may simply be a useful way to advertise the possibilities of a new engineering. "I've done everything from fashion, fragrances to endorsements," Paris Hilton says, calculation that NFTs are another mode for "fans to have a slice of me". As well every bit working with the rapper Ice Cube, Jones recently fabricated an NFT for the whisky company Macallan, to exist auctioned aslope a very expensive cask of scotch. This, information technology seems, is a gustatory modality of where NFTs may be heading: not a radical new model for trading art, merely a digital marketing bauble.
Maybe the near significant legacy of the NFT'south set on on the fine art market will be the questions it forces us to enquire almost the nature of fine art, and what it is that we desire from it. How should art be traded and viewed? Who gets to accredit value to art? Is in that location a moral or artful code by which artists are expected to work, and who has elected themselves to define it? And why would anybody part with their coin in exchange for a digital fart? And then there's the biggest question: is there a meaningful difference between an artwork and an asset? The answer, maybe, is non always – but if we want art to be more than a tool for prettifying finance and flogging merch, then it'due south an ideal worth holding on to.
Source: https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2021/nov/06/how-nfts-non-fungible-tokens-are-shaking-up-the-art-world
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