What is NFT Art?
NFTs are digital assets that completely exist in the cyberspace— you can own it but can’t touch it. NFTs can either be any type of programmed file: an artwork, , music, article or even a meme and “Disaster Girl” is an example, earlier this year the original photo was sold for $500k.
‘Non Fungible Token’ is what NFT stands for, but do you know what that means? Perhaps, it will help you understand what a ‘Fungible Token’ is. If we will apply it in terms of money: a 500 dollar bill can be swapped for five 100 dollar bills and will still have the same value, which means a 500 dollar bill is a fungible token.
The thing is: how will this relatively new, digital means of selling art will affect creators and the art industry?
For Creators, what does NFT means?
1. Digital art Ownership
Before Cryptocurrency exist, we never really got to own something that was completely digital. There are repurposed and reposted videos and motion graphics, but there wasn't this modern opportunity to significantly accept complete, concrete ownership over a digital artwork or file. The popularity of NFT’s changes this, giving creators the full authority to rent out digital artworks, as well as to sell or display them how they want it to be.
For them to sell it, designers need to acquire some kind of ‘legal’ ownership of their work. It’s ‘minted’ or tokenized on the cryptocurrency service, Blockchain after an NFT art is made. Speaking of Blockchain, it is a digital transaction system that records information so that it will be very difficult to scam or hack, meaning it’s extremely useful for tracking copyright ownership and maintaining records of creation. Logically, any digital masterpiece you make and mint will usher solely to you.
2. A new way to generate income
NFT art is an entirely new way of classifying digital artworks that allows designers to monetize their works. It is assumingly a quicker procedure and a more accessible way for designers to produce work and reap the rewards for their creativity. There’s no chasing clients for payment, there’s no preparing files for print and there’s no waiting to hear feedback or changing and editing your work to suit a client’s needs.
Royalties
A number of NFT art comes with royalties to the artist or the creator, it means every time the artwork is sold on, 8–10% of all future sales is what the artist can receive. But this also depends on which platform the artist is using; an NFT platform like Zora comes with the “Creative Share” option, it means users can buy and trade artworks immediately.
NFTs are not freestanding
One more thing that has an impact in the design industry enormously by the outbreak of NFTs is value. A physical artwork compared to a virtual work of art has significantly different values. And cryptocurrency is the only basis of the value of NFT’s and CryptoArt.
3. The International reach
In the past, artworks solely depend in physical spaces concerning physical artworks. Creators or artists made money from venue events like exhibitions and markets until the present world issues made this venues stop. NFT trading means that collecting art has been moved to online, making it possible to more artists, on a global scale, that previously had the chance to sell their work to interested buyers.
Exclusivity and inclusivity
The NFTs art sector had declared to make it inclusive, to protect digital artists and help them to make money. Whoever has access to a computer can make an NFT and have the possibility for it to be well admired: regardless if your niche is 3D motion graphics or blocky pixels like the Nyan Cat video (which sold for $600,00, might I add), or realistic. This has the potential to be life-changing for millions of creatives worldwide.
4. A sturdy eco-friendly mark
One dispute about the NFT artworks world is the impact it’s having on the environment. The news about French artist Joanie Lemercier after his NFT was sold out in 10 seconds, and he made thousands of dollars. So unbelievable, right? Well, the energy this transaction would consume is what he did not expect: the 8.7 megawatt-hours of energy! And it is equivalent to more than the 2 full year period use of his studio.
When the piece was resold, and had used the same amount of energy and horrified the artist who had looked to sell work online as an eco-friendly alternative to transporting physical work around the world’s museums.
As expected, the fact that NFT artworks are so resource-heavy is extremely alarming for many designers. But this issue isn’t entirely to trading cryptoart; it’s part of a bigger issue involving the digital mechanism, “proof of work”. Since the early 90s, proof of work has evolved to be used mainly in mining cryptocurrency to mint and make tokens like ethereum and bitcoin. Exceptionally powered computers essentially compete to get the most bitcoin and need to source a huge amount of electricity to do so.
The evolution of greener options are still ongoing, but while bitcoin is still the one dominating cryptocurrencies, this process that is so harmful to the environment is proving unavoidable for any designers wishing to sell their art as NFTs.
