The Art Blocks Curated Collection — how galleries dress themselves in the NFT world
The art world has shifted quite a lot in the past two decades, especially after it reinstated its economic power post-crisis. A lot of investors turned towards art for its reliability — Old Masters, Modern Art — but also for its spontaneous growth possibility — contemporary art. Most prices are no longer justifiable for a work of art, however, they keep growing and growing. The art practice has also diversified a great deal since the Modern times, opening the possibility of everything.
But the art world is yet to surprise us, as it managed when it merged into the latest fashion of crypto currency. Taking the form of an NFT (Non-Fungible Token), art is stocked within the Ethereum blockchain and can be purchased via crypto currency in the form of digital art, over which you have proof of ownership and can resell on the crypto market as you please. This phenomena spread fast and even became some kind of mania in the past months, mostly among Gen Z and Millenials.
Though there is a wide variety of artsy NFTs, and everyone can watch a tutorial and then post their artwork (or not even close to one) on the blockchain as an NFT, there are certain Collections, or series of artworks that have gained a huge amount of attention (and funds) and keep trending on profile websites. One of these is Art Blocks Curated, both a creator and a curated sharing platform.
So what do you find in the Art Blocks Curated portfolio? First of all, they create on-demand generated content. What does this mean? You see an image of a style you like and you purchase the work but not as the final product, but as a seed of a work that will be. This final product will be automatically generated from the seed through an algorithm. This means you don’t know how your piece is going to look like until after you purchased it. Even so, the possibilities are limited and there is no bottomless jar of versions from the same seed. The Collection established a maximum number of generated data per image and once the sales exceed it, they will pass to the secondary market — probably increasing their price. It`s important to mention that the final `product` can be a simple image, a 3-D image or an interactive experience.
There are eight styles of generative NFTs in the Art Blocks Curated `factory`, each more different than the other. Galaxiss uses layers of noises in order to generate an infinite possibility of terrain after minting it (the mining version of generative crypto art). Enso is inspired from Zen culture and mimics the natural hand gesture of writing the symbol and the final result varies in ink, brush and movement. In an era of digital everything, the next digital art project, Gazettes, sells itself as a tribute to printed media, without focusing on its content but on layouts, design, headlines and so on. One of the interactive NFTs on the platform is ByteBeats, mixing visual arts with music, but in a more ‘00 screensaver look. It uses audio and video files that are arranged through bitwise operations in order to generate a random visual vibe linked with the music, which also varies from hard-rock to meditation sounds. An Origami Dream artwork will always have two states — dynamic or static — depending on the owner’s click. The seeds are based on the number 13, as the points in origami or the number of characters used by the artist, placed on top of two layers of randomly-colored stars. Of course religion could not be excluded from the internet realm, therefore worshipers of the almighty CryptoGodKing can purchase its iconography in the form of NFTs. While still remaining within the sky, Asterisms gives the buyer a true interactive experience by allowing one’s imagination to unfold and play with any pattern between any two or more stars, unlike constellations which have a predefined form and meaning. Last but not least from the platform’s factory is a soulful project called Dear Hash, described gracefully by the artist as “a love letter to the beautiful hash behind the art”. It seems like a metaphor for all the trials and errors, the works destroyed and sketches that really lay behind a finished work of art.
As stated before, the Art Blocks Curated Collection does not only rely on its own artists, but has a separate section for curated content. The last currently open generative art project from this section is called Watercolor Dreams and showcases the artist’s turn on chance, mixing elements from watercolor technique, meditation and reconstruction. The final artwork then evolves in front of its owner into something unique.
The price for one generative artwork fluctuates in the range of hundreds of dollars when minting, leading up to thousands on the secondary auction market. The demand for NFT art is clearly there, but the phenomena has also incited quite the polemic. While digital art in general praises itself in being a new-age, eco-friendly version of art which stands for the democratization of art, the Art Blocks Curated Collection resembles the traditional institution of the gallery more than one initially thinks of. First of all, the blockchain technology is far from eco-friendly, the fact that it consumes an absurd amount of energy to mine crypto is well-known. Minting generative NFTs might not be as energy-consuming, but the difference is not consistent enough. The platform also provides only curated content, which might be a breath of fresh air for the trained art world eye — given the infinite types of content sold as NFT art — but this practice resembles the one of the traditional gallery and disables the democratic trait of digital art. Lastly, liberal access to art can also be disputed in the case of NFTs, especially on-demand generated artworks, as only paying customers can enjoy them at their fullest.
It is curious, then, how the traditional art world has found its place in the new digital era, among crypto art and blockchain transactions. It remains a question of how long the Art Blocks Curated Collection will remain trending, or rather how long it will take until all trending NFTs will have their seed in traditional art world practices.
