How NFTs are reshaping Australia’s cultural landscape
The emerging NFT art market is deemed sheer lunacy by some but to artists such as Raoul Marks it’s very serious — and exciting — business.
When two-time Emmy winning filmmaker Raoul Marks was invited to create the opening sequence for Sydney’s Semi Permanent design conference in 2015 he, in the spirit of the collaborative event, open sourced his creation. The pensive title sequence, featuring an astronaut plunging through a mercurial firmament, was downloaded more than 40,000 times, transmogrifying into a ubiquitous Instagram meme. What Marks intended to be an intimate and allegorical self-portrait of an artist and the age of anonymity had somewhat ironically tumbled from space and into pop culture.
In 2021 Alessio De Vecchi, chief curator at leading invite-only Non-Fungible Token (NFT) marketplace SuperRare, tracked Marks down to Melbourne, where he was hauled up creating his award-winning title sequences for television in collaboration with director Patrick Clair. The pair’s credits include The Crown, Halt and Catch Fire, Westworld and both True Detective and The Man in the High Castle – for which they were decorated with Emmy Awards in 2014 and 2016 respectively.
As a respected curator in the then-nascent NFT art world, De Vecchi had noticed Marks’ creative elements from Semi Permanent manifesting in countless artworks, where they were collectively trading for millions of dollars. Did Marks want in on the action?
“I was glad to hear people were using my work to create their own art,” Marks suggests from a bar in Fremantle, the West Australian port city of his childhood he once again calls home. “Open sourcing is part of digital culture, part of the language. It’s an example of why being generous is a good thing. I had no idea as to how that was going to come back to benefit me.”
Reclaiming the astronaut motif, Marks released his first publicly-listed NFT through SuperRare in April 2021. It would go on to sell for $100,000: a staggering debut by any measure. By October of that year Marks had auctioned five artworks, grossing around $380,000 – among them the original Semi Permanent sequence which sold for more than $160,000 alone.
“By the time you learn about something new you tend to have missed the boat,” Marks smiles dismissively. “But the astronaut had clearly travelled a long way before me.”
US artist Kevin McCoy is credited with creating the very first NFT in 2014, but the medium would not enter the common lexicon until late 2020. An NFT is, in essence, a means of creating singularity – or non-fungibility – in the digital realm, where everything is otherwise innately and infinitely duplicatable.
Exploiting blockchain technology, a digital image – whether static or motion, and with or without audio – is minted as a token and added to the Ethereum blockchain (a rival crypto ledger to Bitcoin), where it is given a unique hash (akin to a serial number) that ensures its provenance.
Unlike Bitcoin, a speculative currency underwritten exclusively by a collective postulation as to its value, an NFT is a piece of digital real estate: a unique asset whose value can be determined aesthetically as well as monetarily. Digital natives, tech entrepreneurs and crypto-investors (many spooked by pandemic-induced economic stagnation) were quick to see the potential in NFTs as a tangible asset in which to park their crypto, with an eye to flip it for a profit as successive waves of investors joined the feverish market. And join they did, by the millions.
If NFTs gave early rise to optimism for a creative marketplace free of the shackles of the curatorial gatekeepers and their establishment prejudice, it just as expeditiously proffered cause for deep cynicism as to whether NFTs were merely the next speculative pyramid scheme destined to capsize spectacularly. And no NFT attracted such divided loyalties as the pixilated CryptoPunks and, soon after, gonzo-esque Bored Ape Yacht Club.
At a glance these singular avatars appear little more than quaint, if not hackneyed, digital trading cards: a fad not unlike the McDonald’s-engineered Beanie Babies craze of the late 1990s. But as those who covet Beanie Babies well know, it is impossible to purchase a rare example today for less than half a million dollars. Similarly, CryptoPunks and Bored Apes – of which there are 10,000 of each in circulation (significantly fewer than the 100 million Beanie Babies manufactured) – regularly trade for $250,000 apiece. Both collections have surpassed one billion in total sales in recent months, with significantly higher market capitalisation.
While their aesthetic value is of fervent conjecture, both CryptoPunks and Bored Ape Yacht Club have created entire ecosystems for their communities of collectors, where your purchase buys you access into an exclusive realm with both virtual and terrestrial benefits beyond the impudent bragging rights of ownership. Celebrity endorsement, too, did little to slow the ever-augmenting value, with the likes of Jay-Z, Paris Hilton, Eminem, Serena Williams and basketball star Stephen Curry flaunting their digital acquisitions.
The increasingly pervasive pop cultural appeal of such NFT brands has tempted countless others into minting their own, including Hilton with a range of fetishist animations with felicitous titles such as All Eyes on Me, Tabloid Dysphoria and Truth is Freedom: the latter which comes bundled with a lunch and shopping spree with Hilton herself.
Julian Assange, too, would collaborate on a work with fabled NFT protagonist Pak. Clock – a simple monochrome piece that displays the numbers of days Assange has been incarcerated – raised well over $70m at auction to assist in funding Assange’s legal defence. Pak holds the overall record for an NFT auction, albeit broken into “masses” sold to multiple bidders. The Merge, a tessellation of 312,686 individual NFTs that form a singular white orb, saw more than 28,000 successful bidders nudge the collective price beyond $126m.
Then came Melania Trump with her Head of State Collection – indeed not a subversive statement on illusion and power by the former First Lady, but a cynical publicity stunt in which she was exposed to allegedly be both seller and buyer. Declaring “the world has gone terminally insane”, British actor John Cleese released his own NFT, an abecedarian doodle of the Brooklyn Bridge, and put it to auction for $US69.3m. It remains unsold.
Cleese’s audacious reserve price references the March 2021 record-setting auction of Everydays: the First 5000 Days, a mosaic of 5000 NFTs created over 13 years by Mike Winkelmann, known artistically as Beeple. Cleese, in custom raillery however, put a 50 cent premium on his own piece. While Winkelmann’s was the biggest single-buyer NFT sale in history – and with it the third priciest single piece by a living artist ever, knocking off Jeff Koons’ Balloon Dog – the moment was equally historic as it heralded the entry of one of the most esteemed brands in the establishment art world to non-fungible tokens: Christie’s.
In footage of the sale, Winkelmann watches on from his lounge chair as bidding inches up to $25m, before abruptly leaping to $50m in the final minute. Tech and crypto entrepreneur Vignesh Sundaresan would ultimately make the successful bid in the very final second. As well as declaring digital art having formally arrived, Winkelmann then quipped somewhat parabolically: “I’m going to Disneyworld!”
The speed at which the NFT market has not only emerged but detonated has indeed rendered it a garish theme park to many. Like Koons before him – who still holds top ranking as the most expensive living artist of all time, with his controversial Rabbit sculpture – Winkelmann’s sale provoked centuries-old quarrels over aesthetic merit, and the supposed sanctimonious demarcation between fine art and ephemeral kitsch.
The anonymous collector and NFT platform pioneer known as Fastackl intrinsically understands the complexities of NFT ownership and the obfuscation between collectibles and art. An early adopter of NFTs, he originally invested with the singular motivation of selling those assets for a profit. But the plan came spectacularly unstuck soon after his inaugural purchase in December 2020, when he secured a rare collaborative work between global dance music megastar Deadmau5 and Australian artist Stuart Campbell, known as Sutu.
“It very quickly went from a flip to a collection,” Fastackl laughs self-consciously, from somewhere “in the Asian time zone”. “I’ve now spent an irresponsible amount of my children’s inheritance on these artworks, and I never intend to sell. You can’t argue with the market about artistic value. Sure, you can argue until you’re blue in the face about merit, but the market is going to tell you what’s attracting attention and what people value.”
While Fastackl admits to having no previous experience in the visual art space, he quickly recognised the potential of the NFT medium for practising artists, providing them a direct revenue stream beyond the stranglehold of the gatekeepers of major institutions and the traditional art world. But what proved most thrilling was that NFT sales – valued at over $50bn in 2021 – were most-often to an entirely new customer-base that had likely never wantonly stepped into an art gallery in their lives.
Clearly identifying the value artworks were generating as stand-alone tokens on the Ethereum blockchain, Fastackl banded together with an anonymous cache of gallerists, artists and software developers to form the Kanon art collective. Kanon’s first project was so lucid it was radical: to create a new crypto currency underwritten by a vault of 21 major works of NFT art. Unlike other crypto currencies, the 21 million K21 tokens planned for circulation are underpinned by these liquid assets, in the way physical currencies are (supposedly) underpinned by federal gold reserves.
“What I dream of is being able to create a very rich and generative society that uses a currency that is built on something,” Fastackl, one of the project’s co-founders, says. “Having that art there as the bedrock, if everything implodes there will always be that incredible, irreplaceable art there forever.”
As part of their remunerative contract, the 21 artists involved were each allocated approximately $100,000 with stipulation it be donated to an organisation or cause of their choice. As one of the chosen artists in the collection, Marks donated his portion to the Fremantle Biennale: revealing the very tangible intersection between the virtual and terrestrial art worlds. And the latter is playing increasingly more forensic attention to this digital revolt.
Indeed, Marks was recently invited to show at Boston’s Pellas Gallery, which “hung” the works in a traditional exhibition format on framed high definition screens. While many NFT collectors emulate the traditional art world in choosing to store the original and valuable works in secure vaults, Marks believes that it is these corporeal templates for exhibiting NFTs that will prove the next frontier. French design agency Dalbin is presently fabricating furniture with seamless in-built screen technology on which to display NFTs, and its collaboration with Marks is to be debuted at the Centre Pompidou in Paris later this year.
“Picasso didn’t necessarily choose painting or sculpture as the medium that best suited his expression,” Marks, who cites his own artistic inspirations as Jeffrey Smart and Rick Amor, ruminates. “They were just the tools available to him at the time. Today a lot more is possible with the technology artists have access to.”
Few mediums have been the benefactor of – nor victim to – technology quite like music. While technological innovation revolutionised the way music was recorded it also radically altered the way it was distributed, spelling the near-extinction of the physical recording: traditionally a major source of revenue for most contemporary musicians.
Like the trending musical genres that nourished them, Australian NFT artist and music industry protagonist Joan Westenberg has seen music formats come and go – and with them songwriters unable to sustain a tangible career as streaming gutted sales and the pandemic shuttered stages.
Music NFT platform Moda Dao was born of this cataclysmic confluence of technological disruption and a global shutdown. As the pandemic destroyed many a musical career it also forced people’s lives online, and expedited what Westenberg believes to be the most dynamic evolution in the music industry in decades, in bringing value and utility to digital assets in the metaverse.
“With a piece of music we are talking about something that no one has actually owned for the past few years,” Moda Dao founding member Westenberg offers.
“When you download or stream a song you actually don’t own anything, you’re paying for the privilege of listening to that piece of music in specific situations. What we are looking at with NFTs is a way to re-examine provenance and say you are actually able to fully and completely own a piece of music that you are purchasing. And you can trade it as an asset. That is a very new paradigm for anyone in this space.”
As opposed to streaming, Moda Dao taps into the impassioned world of music collectibles: allowing fans to buy and trade rare NFTs which could be as diverse as a cache of unreleased songs, limited-release live material, original album art and video content or exclusive access to shows and merchandise. What defines the value of these NFTs is scarcity, with the unique hash – or serial number – as proof. As with major NFT art platforms such as SuperRare, Nifty Gateway and OpenSea, artists receive a percentage of resale in perpetuity, commonly 10 per cent: something until now largely unseen in the secondary music and art markets.
“My advice is never buy an artwork to make money, in the real world or online,” Marks concludes, concurring with Fastackl and Westenberg that the NFT world is likely destined for some kind of severe market reckoning not unlike the dot.com implosion of 2000, before recalibrating into a formidable and enduring medium.
“Buy art because it speaks to you. In art you are defined by the audience you communicate with, and NFTs offer almost endless potential in terms of audience reach. We live so much of our lives online, and increasingly so, so it is no longer a stretch to imagine owning something in that space. Something that brings you joy. Something that belongs to you, and only you.”
THE NFT BASICS:
NFTs – non fungible tokens – are virtual tokens that use blockchain technology to record proof of ownership of pretty much anything unique or scarce – from as collectable playing cards to digital artwork.
W They have exploded in popularity as a way for creators to monetise artwork, songs and images in a way that wasn’t really possible before. That’s because they are digitally certified with a unique signature that is practically impossible to forge.
W Artworks, gifs or memes are the most popular NFTs. Sales hit $25bn in 2021, according to figures from NFT data specialist DappRadar. This surged from just $95m in 2020.
W The most popular host blockchain for NFTs, and the currency they are most often priced in, is Ethereum, whose digital coin ether is the world’s second-largest crypto. People buy NFTs and can store them alongside any other coins in an Ethereum-enabled crypto wallet.
W One of the most obvious use-cases for NFT is in art, because of the difficulty that the art world has in proving ownership.
W Collectors have come to the realisation that having an unfakeable digital representation of an asset is of serious real-world value. NFTs have attracted wealthy enthusiasts in the same way as rare first editions or any other hard-to-source object.
W US rock band Kings of Leon were one of the first to sell an album as a collection of NFTs. The band made more than $US2m in music sales using this method when the record was released in March 2021.
