NFTs are Great For Artists
This January I created and minted a series of NFTs to see what all the fuss was about. It’s been a great experience and if you’d like to know more about it feel free to read all about it here and check out my Instagram page to let me know what you think about the artwork!
I’ve seen a lot of concern that NFTs are just a fad and that they aren’t a sustainable investment. Honestly, I think some of these claims may turn out to be valid. In my opinion, most of the more popular NFT collections lack value. The Bored Apes and Crypto Punks in the market are not quality pieces of art. People are eager to invest in them because of media attention. So by my estimation, either popular NFTs will fade out in a few months or they’ll continue to coast in popularity, and I’m not sure which route it will take.
What I do know, is that thousands of great artists have seen the potential in the NFT community to sell, and promote their art. Selling commissions is a difficult market, and unless an artist has a sizable following, making money selling art was nearly impossible. However the popularity of NFTs has allowed smaller artists to reliably sell their work, and I think quality artwork will continue to thrive in the NFT marketplace.
Elon Musk Sculpture By Raf Grasseti
Art is considered to be subjective, however, there are fundamentals in place that make a piece good. I believe originality is one of those fundamentals and right now the NFT marketplace is filled with unoriginal art that only wealthy people can afford.
Despite the current state of the NFT marketplace, when you dig a little deeper you can find tons of fantastic artwork like the sculpture pictured above. The majority of art represented on NFT platforms comes from smaller, talented artists.
Because NFTs are currently seen as a sort of ‘trading card’ token the value is set by whoever owns the token. The original creator is paid a royalty every time a token is resold. This is incredibly beneficial to growing artists.
NFT platforms allow artists to host their digital art on a platform that highly encourages sales, making it easy to make a profit with artwork. NFTs have also assigned a system of unique value to digital art. In my experience selling commissions, my clients almost always chose physical art because they didn’t see any value in a digital piece that can be easily stolen or copied via screenshot. With NFTs people are starting to see the value in unique digital art. Cryptocurrency and NFTs have given artists the ability to seamlessly sell their artwork and to continue earning money when those NFTs resell.
This relatively new system of selling digital art is a revolutionary way for artists to sell their artwork online. Given some time I’m confident that any artist can make more money selling their art in an NFT format. I can see comic book artists, concept artists, storyboard artists, and freelancers minting their work as NFTs and earning income that way instead of a static paycheck.
This format puts the advantage with the artists and allows us to make money from our work on our terms. It also gives us several simple and popular platforms to post that art for sale. Even though it is a crowded platform right now with bland copy/pasted apes at the forefront, the potential for great art to shine on these NFT platforms is tremendous, and I can’t wait to see what kind of great art becomes popular in the future.
If you want to learn more about NFTs or you would like to see my work check out this project I made where I created an NFT collection in 30 days!
