The [Crypto] Art of the Experiment
“Painting, sculpture, and all manner physical art are dead.
Long live painting, sculpture, and physical art.”
-Montbland
Just kidding… not really.
On Sunday, September 20, 2020, I formally made the transition from selling physical art (large scale oil paintings), to digital “cryptoart” on the blockchain. It was eye-opening.
And what was even more interesting, is that I didn’t sell one digital painting; I sold five, in the span of two hours. I’ll come back to that…
First though, imagine someone telling your future-self in the year 2048: “Oh, you know, we kinda got so futuristic as a society, with robots, artificial intelligence, and virtual reality, that we sort of had to put all that physical art in storage.”
While this theoretically could happen, as humans I don’t think we’ll ever stop falling in love with physical paintings, or art that was expertly crafted by human hands, with raw materials. It’s in our nature.
Figuration, for example, is arguably why painting (as an art form) was created. One of my painting heroes, famously once said:
“Flesh is the reason oil paint was invented”.
-Willem de Kooning
I tend to agree. But physical paintings also have their own… physical limitations.
And our affection for tangible art should not hold us back from embracing new artistic mediums. Whether we are artists, collectors, enthusiasts, students, educators, gallerists, dealers, curators, or investors.
Especially if those new mediums categorically challenge the art world industrial complex / status quo.
I’m no an art historian… but last time I checked art has never been about maintaining the status quo. If anything, artists are professional status quo destroyers. That’s how they create value.
You may already know the blockchain is useful, or that Bitcoin is super important and eating the financial world, or that CryptoArt is in its infancy stages of becoming a mega-important emerging asset class.
Currently, CryptoArt is only available to purchase on a handful of websites, like OpenSea, Foundation, Rarible, SuperRare, KnownOrigin, Nifty Gateway, MakersPlace, and Async Art.
As a painter, to bridge the gap between the traditional art world and the CryptoArt world, I knew I had to do something innovative and FUN.
I decided to price all of the digital paintings from my first series, using an atypical, yet utterly simple strategy. Here’s what I’m doing:
My first cryptoart series is called BACTERIA. It is 250 (single edition) digital paintings / NFT’s. Each will be priced exactly 0.01 ETH higher than the previous. That’s it.
Digital Painting #1 = 0.01 ETH
Digital Painting #2 = 0.02 ETH
Digital Painting #3 = 0.03 ETH
Digital Painting #68 = 0.68 ETH
Digital Painting #142 = 1.42 ETH
Digital Painting #250 = 2.5 ETH
After I announced a “pre-sale” late night on Twitter, the direct messages began flooding in. There was more demand than supply, so I had to operate on a first-come / first-serve basis. Here’s what happened…
‘Actinomyces Citreofluorescens’
#1 of 250
Sold for 0.01 ETH / $3.42
to @burst_cryptoart
‘Bacteroides Pneumosintes’
#2 of 250
Sold for 0.02 ETH / $6.84
to @burst_cryptoart
‘Confluentimicrobium Naphthalenivorans’
#3 of 250
Sold for 0.03 ETH / $10.26
to @Kyloren_NFT
‘Dethiosulfovibrio Acidaminovorans’
#4 of 250
Sold for 0.04 ETH / $13.68
to @kokokocrypto
‘Epilithonimonas Psychrotolerans’
#5 of 250
Sold for 0.05 ETH / $17.09
to @punk_cipher
IT WAS OVER IN A FLASH.
The first tranche of the pre-sale sold out instantly. The complete pre-sale allocated 10% of the project, approximately 25 digital paintings, made available to collectors who expressed interest directly on Twitter. Ultimately, 31 paintings were sold during the pre-sale.
My Twitter handle by the way is @Montbland, DM’s are open, hit me up.
Now that the pre-sale is over, new artwork will be released in batches, in a controlled manner. The next batch of 25 (give or take) will be announced in April, 2021. Each new group of digital paintings will be announced on Twitter, where and how to purchase it, and will adhere strictly to the pricing schedule described above. The pricing model will apply until #250 is sold for 2.5 ETH. In terms of future projects, I may re-employ the same strategy, we shall see. The paintings are changing too, here’s an example from the next group to be released:
People frequently ask me, what do these paintings mean? What I can share is that each one is named after a unique strain of bacteria, and have a certain disco ball aesthetic to them that I like.
Damien Hirst is one of my favorite artists, and his multi-colored Spot Paintings are all named after pharmaceutical drugs, which I think is brilliant naming convention. And so I decided to take page from his book.
I chose bacteria as my primary naming convention because, i) it’s too hard to think up cool names for art, ii) its an on-going series so the structure needed to be uniform, and iii) they look like bacteria under a microscope.
Bacteria is everywhere, and life could not exist without it. More than 20,000 strains have been identified by scientists and biologists. Due to the pandemic beginning in 2020, people everywhere have had to consciously confront both viruses and bacteria, so this series is a response to that.
Final thought. Art is meant to uplift the human experience. My goal for everyone who participates in this project is to have fun, and to watch what happens.
#DontSleepOnCryptoArt
Montbland
* * UPDATES * *
After announcing the 2nd tranche of the pre-sale, 7 paintings sold in less than an hour. Several days later, 11 more sold, catapulting me into Rarible’s top-seller rankings for the day, at #11 within their ecosystem.
Within 22 days from project announcement, 12% (30 paintings have sold). And paintings are now re-selling on the secondary market, and people are selling for multiples of their initial investment.
