NFT World Platforms
An urgent need for greater clarity is emerging in the world of NFT platforms, which are already offering a very large number of diverse and varied products. To enhance the navigation experience, for example OpenSea, With Foundation, Decentraland, Studio, NFT Market, NFT Gallery, have already organised their offer into ten categories: New Art, Collectibles, Domain names, Music, Video, Photography, Sports, Trading cards, Utility and Virtual Worlds, but even these organisations have lots of overlaps and gray areas, and we believe these marketplaces need greater clarity, stability and transparency in order to attract new collectors. That is urgent, thought the market will collapse and its image will affected trust, resulting in negative experiences and collapse market system.
“The disruptive NFT technology escapes the ‘standard’ segmentation of the art market, traditionally organised into periods, mediums, movements, etc. Coving a multitude of extremely innovative initiatives, the NFT phenomenon is spreading into numerous intermingling areas. But, looking ahead, we must continuing working on a framework that will inform players in this market about what is exchanged and about what creates value; in short, a clear and objective way of presenting the information relating to NFTs (origin, edition, supply, demand, use, etc.), information that is necessary to reassure the market”.
That is for the near future.
.Market and users
For its Natively Digital: A Curated NFT Sale, which closed on 10 June 2021, Sotheby’s brought together items as diverse as creations by the collective Art Blocks, a reinterpretation of Claude Monet’s called Meules after Claude Monet painting by the artist digital Matt Kane, the prices was 214,200 USD, 5 second looping mp4 video, as a Non-fungible-Token ERC 721, Minted on May 27, 2021 ed. 1/1, View the assets achieved Arweave & IPFS as part of the NFT.
The next sold artwork was another type of conceptual work by Rhea Myers aptly titled Secret Artwork (Content), was 63,000 USD, year 2018, Non-fungible-token ERC 721, Smart contract data and Web3 visualisation, minted on July 23, 2018, ed. 1/1 about which the artist said “there is nothing rarer than something that doesn’t actually exist”. With her unquestionable influence, conveyed through her explorative and educational research. Myer´s continued experimentation sits at the cutting edge of conceptual experimentation off the NFT form, and Myers herself stands as, one of the leading voices and experts on the conceptual possibilities of the medium with net.art, that is involved with web elements. The cryptographic hash (salted sha256) of the work. The Daedalian artwork is „ownable“ as an Ethereum ERC721 token, though the owner is no more aware of its contents than the wide public. The presentation of the token takes the form of a dapp, a decentralised application that runs on the blockchain, revealing all the artworks details bar its contents. This pieces according Sotheby´s are ever traceable but never knowable, presents an opportunity to acquire an infinity of artistic interpretation and possibility, shrouded by a mysterious yet impenetrable matrix of cryptographic code. An unbreakable bond between artist and owner locked on Ethereum´s digital ledger.
Today, it is clear that NFTs represent a market that is open to all forms of hybridisation, that of art and gaming, design and sport, etc.. Even if certain distinctions seem to have become obsolete, Sotheby’s still chose to sell Cryptopunk 7523 separately (it fetched $11,754,000) which suggests that some NFTs still deserve specific treatment. Such a separation, based solely on demand, would obviously benefit from an accentuation of the homogeneity of the sessions.
This does not necessarily imply excluding CryptoPunks from digital art sales just because they are profile pictures (PFPs) rather than actual works. But it should be recognised that CryptoPunks, generated by random combinations, fall better into the category of Collectibles, however unattractive this rubric may sound.
Collectibles and Art Categories
The confusion between the Collectibles and Art categories is partly based on price… because a profile photo purchased for several million dollars is perhaps an artwork as well. Similarly, when Sina Estavi acquired Jake Dorsay’s first tweet for $2.9 million in March 2021, he compared this piece of code to the world’s most famous work of art, Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa. It could not be understood in this easy way, comparing a Master Piece with a Piece of Code. The Art World is call for injunction and must give also definitely strict lines to follow about meaning and concepts between an artwork and a piece of code, created like an algorithm in an Online Platform, like Tweeter, which are called beautiful works. On the other hand, artworks with heavy backgrounds of significance, allowed them to be impenetrable in an easy way to be compared in doubtless markets like todays rosen Platforms.
The NFT market is therefore still peppered with ambiguity and paradox. Clearly on the side of decentralisation and transparency, the NFT market still harbours numerous anomalies, which Financial Times journalists Hannah Murphy and Joshua Oliver have listed in a somewhat alarmist article entitled “How NFTs became a $40 bn market in 2021”:
The unregulated space is also plagued by fraud, scams and market manipulation, especially because the real-world identities of buyers and sellers is difficult, if not impossible, to discover. Analysis by Nansen found $2 USD million of suspicious activity across the CryptoPunk and Bored Ape collections in the 30 days to mid-December. Some NFTs, for example, were sold at a 95 per cent discount to the average sale price, either because of mistakes by buyers and sellers, tax write-offs or some other scam exploiting unskilled users. Researchers have also warned that the market is likely being inflated by wash trading — when a trader takes both sides of a trade in order to give the false impression of demand.
Emerging Market Channel
So far, there are not enough clear and transparent results to placate such suspicions. In 2021, Artprice databases listed just under 300 NFT lots sold at public auction for a total of $228 million USD, representing just 1.5% ofF the global secondary art market. Among the 100 best auction results of the year 2021 for NFTS, Artprice counted 65 digital artworks, 32 ‘collectibles’, 2 ‘digital zones’ and 1 film sequence.
But this is only the emerging part of a market that is growing at an exponential rate. The sooner the NFT marketplaces allow users to navigate with confidence by providing objective and useful information, the sooner they will reassure collectors and art professionals, and open the world of NFTs to new players, gaming enthusiasts and fellow creators.
All in all, NFTs have successfully triggered an art market revolution in just a few months by flooding it with new works and providing a new sales channel. Initially by attracting young collectors and tech and cryptocurrency enthusiasts, but subsequently by attracting traditional collectors. Because, today, everyone wants to try the NFT experience. Like any revolution, this one is jerky with a lot of volatility that will attenuate over time. It is indeed perfectly natural for a new virgin space to experience a form of ‘Gold Rush’, with ingenuity and excesses at the same time, by the way, anyone interest in joining must have a Wallet. But it is necessary to provide pragmatic solutions for NFT Marketplaces in order to establish the trust that is the driving force behind any exchange on the Internet, especially during this new phase of ‘art market dematerialization’. Indeed, platforms like, Artnet, Arteinformado, Artmarket.com’s principal added-value is making the art market an efficient market over the years thanks to its compilation and exploitation of the most comprehensive art-focused databases in the world, providing sellers and buyers with the essential data they need for engaging in transactions with complete confidence.
Sotheby’s has clearly understood that the Art Market is entering a new phase of very strong growth with NFTs and the metaverse. That’s why Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley are preparing Sotheby’s return to the Stock Exchange via an IPO. Sotheby’s has already taken the plunge by opening the Sotheby’s Metaverse Platform. Furthermore – and this is indeed irrefutable confirmation of the paradigm shift that is occurring – Sotheby’s has just announced it will accept bids in Bitcoin (BTC), Ethereum (ETH), and USD Coin (USADC) cryptocurrencies with Coinbase Commerce for the 555-carat black diamond!
Demystification and Democratisation ?
As signifiers of digital identity, financial investment and access to an exclusive and engaging online community, the NFT avatar market as a phenomenon has grown exponentially in 2021. Acknowledged as a creative digital designation, an avatar is an image of a character in the profile picture (pfp) format. Possessing an array of different traits and utilities including clothing, accessories, expressions and more, each avatar is algorithmically generated and is thus wholly individual and unique. Instilling the NFT with values generated by an unpredictable ID on the blockchain, the avatar only comes into existence when the transaction and minting is complete, in which the collector is integral to the artistic process. The notion of using computer programming to generate works with differing variations has a long-standing tradition within the canon of digital art. Whilst artists of the 1960s called upon generative automation to produce a digital variation of a work, the pop culture practitioners currently producing on-chain NFTs utilise the non-hierarchical nature of true randomness: the entropy of the cryptographic processes on which the blockchain is based.
In our contemporary society, one of the key cultural indicators of the modern age is the selfie. As a generation preoccupied with social media and the concept of the digital self, we are motivated to cultivate our online brands, to the extent that our digital identity is a key aspect of our personhood. With the rapid growth of the NFT community and subsequent use of, and demand for avatars, we are experiencing a crisis of representation and identity formation in the 21st century.
‘The failure of photography to remain dominant as the key signifier of a modernity of constructive, steady, technological progress is epitomized by the notion of the algorithmic selfie that we are culturally pressured to adopt. Social media conditions us to produce fluid adaptable selves, made to maximise herd approval. Our algorithmic selfies, our brands, are in crisis. Indeed, NFT avatars go beyond the realms of digital art. As unique assets with intrinsic value in the metaverse, they hold significant status and a profound desirability on the secondary market. Furthermore, digitally demonstrating a sense of community and access to small groups without a real face, within the NFT space, the avatar signals a profound shift in the contemporary art market; all too often the art world is perceived to be hermetically sealed, with only a small percentage of players invited to participate. Within the NFT community we are seeing a new audience that yearn to bolster one another and belong. Consisting of artists, enthusiasts, collectors, tastemakers, speculators, and investors, this community is characterised by openness and not so clear transparency, and it's more inclusive. What we are witnessing here is the demystification off a no control art world, in which the worlds of art and finance merge to open an entirely new market where speculation and gaming is only marketing; wants to diverse and decentralised. The inherent lack of hierarchy on the blockchain is the mechanism by which access to this world is widening and it is the NFT avatar that could be a pinnacle of a new cultural revolution.
Nely L. Friedrich
February 17 Th. 2022
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