The Ascent of the Internet Art Market

Cryptography-backed digital ownership is fueling a digital collecting revolution

Last week, a single-edition digital artwork sold on SuperRare for over $10,000, setting a new record high for the digital art marketplace.

A collaboration between artists Trevor Jones and Alotta Money, ‘EthGirl’ is inspired by Picasso’s ‘Girl with Mandolin’ (1910) and in Jones’ words, “a 21st century portrait animated with modern iconography and infused with symbolism.”

EthGirl, a collaboration between Trevor Jones and Alotta Money. This single-edition digital artwork was purchased by collector Moderats for $10,000 on Dec. 15th.

While this sale was a historic milestone, it was not an isolated case or publicity stunt. Rather, it is part of an unmistakable trend: adoption of digital art collecting is real, and it is here to stay.

‘EthGirl’ was only one of 267 single-edition artworks collected last week on SuperRare, with the weekly sales volume reaching a total of $49,568. Let that sink in: nearly fifty thousand dollars was spent last week on digital artworks, selling in a digital marketplace for digital money, to collectors who prefer to own, trade and display digital items– whether on a screen, on the internet or in a virtual world.

The excitement around both the art and the market is increasingly palpable. Bidding wars on new works are now almost a daily phenomenon and can easily take over one’s Twitter and SuperRare feeds for an afternoon.

Collector JustMatthew recently wrote a piece titled Spending Thousands of Dollars on #CryptoArt, describing why he spent over $1,600 to collect an artwork titled ‘Saint Nakamoto’ in a SuperRare bidding war that received 22 total bids. To him, the drive to collect is a blend of participating in a movement, supporting artists around the world, and acquiring scarce assets he thinks will be worth much more in the future.

The end of a collector bidding war, on artist Hackatao’s latest animated work

The market’s overnight success (years in the making)

When we launched SuperRare in early 2018, it was amidst a swirl of excitement around what blockchain technology could do for the art market– lots of ideas, experimentation and theories. But it was obvious that only with time (and a lot of hard work) would it be clear how the concepts would play out in the real world.

It’s taken a few years, but the promise of authentic, digitally native artworks traded on the the internet is finally turning into the searing-hot, next-generation art market that we dreamed of when founding SuperRare.

So why is this happening, and where is it headed next?

Gangnam Art Club in the Cryptovoxels virtual world

Collector adoption, VR, and digital worlds

We’ve long believed that collector adoption is the key to making the space take off– many of the decisions we’ve made while building SuperRare have been informed by this. As the SuperRare community has grown, artists have spread word to collectors, who have spread word to other artists. And along the way, we’ve done our best to listen to feedback and improve the experience for artists and collectors as much as possible.

The exponential growth in collector adoption we’ve seen in 2019 coincided with another trend: the rise of open, ownership-based virtual worlds such as Cryptovoxels and Decentraland. In these digital worlds, digital ownership is real and omnipresent– from your plots of own-able, tradable land and buildings, to the artwork you put on your walls, to the gear your avatar wears.

Almost every active collector and artist on SuperRare is also a resident in one or more of these virtual worlds– foreshadowing a rich, interconnected virtual economy taking shape even though the space is still niche.

Why are people collecting digital art?

Tokenized digital art has many advantages:

Speed and reach: Digital assets have a superpower in that they can be viewed, shared, and enjoyed by billions of people across the entire globe simultaneously. New artworks can be seen instantly by billions, as can new collector acquisitions.

Portability & interoperability: Physical items can be hard to store, transport, or travel with. Owning internet-native digital items allows you to bring your collection with you anywhere in the world unencumbered. Also, the emerging digital economy has a high degree of interoperability– buy an artwork on SuperRare and display it in your gallery in any number of digital worlds.

Resale value & artist royalties: SuperRare is a digital art marketplace built on Ethereum, where each asset is a scarce, single-edition digital item. Just like a cryptocurrency market, it is dynamic, 24/7, and global in nature. As awareness of the space has grown, the secondary market has started to take shape. At the time of writing, the average resale on SuperRare has seen an 888% increase in price. Additionally, the original creator of an artwork gets 3% of each secondary sale in the market as a royalty.

Authenticity & provenance: Since each tokenized artwork is a digital item that lives on a distributed ledger, it has baked-in authenticity and provenance. This means it is easy for anyone to see who created a work, at what time, and what ownership or sales history it has accrued since its creation.

Once again, artists are pulling us into the future

Internet-native, collectible digital art is the creative revolution of the 21st century. It brings the age-old traditions of collecting, patronage, speculation, commentary and art appreciation into the digital age, and unlocks creative and economic possibilities that we can’t even imagine yet. It is significant that this is a movement being led foremost by artists, as they are the ones who most often have a knack for drawing humanity into the future.

As the artists say in EthGirl’s accompanying text: this is just the beginning.

Picasso was a creative genius and is undeniably one of the 20th century’s greatest innovators. He was a risk taker with an adept ability to see the world in entirely original and captivating ways. Picasso epitomized this new, digital art movement; fast paced, provocative and unapologetic and EthGirl aims to capture and exemplify this great artist’s avant-garde attitude towards art and life. Watch this space. This is just the beginning.

— Trevor Jones