Picasso on the blockchain: Fine art and NFTs

More and more fine art institutions have been getting into the NFT space, with noted auction houses Sotheby’s and Christie’s hosting their own NFT auctions. Christie’s, most famously, auctioned Everydays: the First 5000 Days in 2021. The work sold for over $69,000,000, and the nature of selling a digital art piece at this price level was unprecedented in Christie’s history.

Now, the digital art and traditional art world are colliding with each other, but with artists from the traditional sphere looking to monetize through NFTs at both auction houses and online NFT marketplaces.

Let’s take a look at the impact and landscape of fine art in the NFT space, and who is at the forefront of the movement.

TL;DR

Due to its growing prominence as a vehicle for monetization and as a tool for authentication, NFT technology has garnered attention, and recent adoption, from fine art investors, traditional artists and those that represent them.

From Christie’s Beeple Sale to APENFT and Picasso, and Particle fractionalizing Banksy, this combination of new and traditional is going to change the art world forever.

A bit of art history

Detractors of the NFT movement like to call into question the artistic merit and value of digital art. But as groundbreaking and divisive as NFTs can be, this heated debate over what qualifies as “good art” is nothing new. In fact, the debate over what merely qualifies as art is nothing new. Take Marcel Duchaump, a French painter who in the early 20th century sparked this conversation with his “readymade” art pieces. His piece Bicycle Wheel is, well, a bicycle wheel affixed to a stool and thereafter proclaimed art.

So… there clearly is and has been an ongoing debate about what qualifies as art, and as such it makes sense that there would be a debate over the value of digital art. Assigning judgements of quality and thus viability in the market thus becomes a little tricky. One thing we can be sure of, however, is that there is a lot of interest and capital in the NFT art space, and as artists and auction houses lean more and more into NFTs as a new way to monetize their works, its growing market cap will only continue to only rise.

What NFT technology does for fine art

A huge part of fine art acquisition, especially when talking about very well-known pieces, is the assurance that a buyer is receiving the authentic work. Before NFTs, this verification was relegated to physical certificates of authenticity. But with anything physical, forgeries, loss, and destruction are much easier to befall a collector.

With a secure, digital, and immutable authenticator like an on-chain NFT, those sorts of problems are vanishingly less frequent.

And what about the artist?

So what’s in it for the so-called traditional artist? A couple of things. Well, minting your art as an NFT on a digital marketplace provides a much more direct path to investors. Less middlemen means less people taking a cut. And of course there is the connection with an entirely new audience.

The NFT market recently hit a milestone when it was reported that it had grown to $41 billion. A striking figure given its closeness to the estimated $50 billion fine art industry. So it stands to reason that more and more players in the traditional art space- investors, auction houses, and artists alike- will put their efforts towards art on the blockchain.

Examples of Fine Art on NFT Marketplaces

Not only are auction houses getting in on NFT tech, the NFT marketplaces themselves are also hosting works by traditional artists on their platforms in an attempt to attract new audiences to their listings.

For example, let’s look at APENFT. APENFT’s mission is to connect the NFT crowd and smaller investors with high-quality investment opportunities in the form of fine art NFTs, while also upgrading the way that these art pieces are hosted. With platforms like this, more people will have access to works previously inaccessible to the general public.

NFT project Particle is fractionalizing NFTs, and successfully completed their first fractionalization of a Banksy work, splitting it into 10,000 NFTs called “particles”.

The Beeple Sale

The Beeple auction conducted by traditional auction house Christie’s is seen as the biggest flashpoint so far in the story of the traditional art world’s melding with NFT technology.

Beeple is a digital artist that had amassed a large Instagram following and had already sold his works on platforms like Nifty Gateway. But having his art sold by a fine art gallery, especially one with such a long and famous history, is seen by many as a watershed moment. Selling for over $69 million, Beeple has become one of the wealthiest living artists in the world.

Marketplaces

Let’s take a look at some of the marketplaces and auction houses offering digital art and NFT-ized fine art.

Christie’s

The aforementioned Christie’s made headlines when they auctioned digital artist Beeple’s Everydays: the First 5000 Days for over $69 million. But this wasn’t the first time the auction house has used blockchain technology in its auctions. Back in 2018, Christie’s sold a Barney A. Ebsworth work and recorded the sale on the blockchain through digital art registry service provider Artory. And this wasn’t just a once-off experiment, as Christie’s is auctioning off more NFTs to artworks.

Sotheby’s

Sotheby’s, another very famous and storied auction house, has made a foray into the sale of NFT art. With their ‘Natively Digital’ sale first conducted in 2021, they conducted an auction of curated NFT works.

And they haven’t stopped there. Sotheby’s has stepped into the metaverse- Decentraland’s metaverse, to be exact- with a digital version of their brick-and-mortar in London. This is a place where the auction house can host sales such as the ‘Natively Digital’ sale.

APENFT

APENFT, as mentioned previously, operates with the mission to bring fine art to the masses. Hosting pieces by such artists as Picasso and Andy Warhol, the project wants to open up a new asset class to the NFT community.

And they are backing up this ethos of democratization with their governance protocol, as they operate on a community voting mechanism to make platform decisions, where token holders can participate.