Why are jpegs worth money now? An art expert’s opinion.
Georg Bak has been in the art world for over 20 years. He started following the Net Art movement in the 90s, and was left wondering why there wasn’t a market for digital art.
In 2017, he felt bothered with the art scene, it was overdue for a refresh. He was seeing developers and coders exploring digital art, but not being able to enter the very closed art circles at the time.
That is when he decided to prepare an exhibition on blockchain art, where in 2018 he showed the now famous Crypto Punks to a worldwide audience.
Crypto Punk
He wanted to explore the question of whether a digital artwork can be assigned the same value as a physical artwork. It is all a matter of convention: digital art has value if enough people think it does. The more people agree it has value, the more value it has.
After all, why would a canvas be valuable? It is not about the materials, but the skills of the artist, and the convention around those skills.
Art is also a status symbol, as important collectors play a role in assigning value to an artist’s work. Georg thinks digital avatars will be the next status symbol: with more and more events happening on the Metaverse, he says that it is only natural not to want to show up as a naked avatar, but be prepped up with some great NFT wearables, to be able to meet more people and differentiate ourselves. Having a bored ape as a profile picture means something in terms of who someone is, what communities they belong to, and what social circles they surround themselves with.
Bored Ape Yacht Club
From the beginning, Georg saw digital avatars as artworks, because they are innovative and create something that did not exist before in the art world: new ways of forming communities, of interacting with the artworks, and a new way of building digital identity.
Today Georg is working on a new ambitious project: he is throwing a series of events on Crypto Voxels, where he retraces the history of digital art, showcasing historical works, and explaining the origins of digital art. There will also be NFT drops that pay tribute to innovators in this field, giving people the ability to purchase wearables, and NFTs such as Reeps100 (Harry Yeff) and Trung Baovoice gems, that are visual sculptures made from the combination of a voice recording with an algorithm.
The Metaverse shows will climax into a physical event in October 2022 in Switzerland, where everyone will be able to admire NFTs in real life, just like they did at Georg’s 2018 event, except this time the convention around digital art is in a very different place.
Written by Eli Strzelecka on 17 January 2022.
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