Digital Art Review: February 2023
AI art goes parabolic, 2.5X↑ in Feb; digital art at LACMA and Centre Pompidou; artists fighting to maintain royalties; market remains fragile; rally driven by speculators.
Digital art sitting out the market rally: Despite 2X increase in NFT trading volumes in February, the market remains fragile. Speculators were busy “farming” $BLUR token by trading most liquid NFT collections on the new marketplace. Based on current $BLUR prices, people received $280M in liquidity for free which they pumped back into the market thereby further lifting prices of most liquid NFT collections like Bored Apes and Azuki, on average, by 15%. Sustainability of this strategy is questionable. Meanwhile premium art saw low volumes and price decline: generative art 1%↓, photography 15%↓. As $BLUR farming quiets down, collectors expect digital art to rebound, as Liam Herbst explained in his thread.
Demand for AI art goes parabolic: Roope Rainisto took the art world by storm when he released Life in West America in February. Stunning series comprising 500 AI-generated post-photography images. It was a true watershed moment for AI art. Just like Tyler Hobbs’ Fidenza captivated everyone – not only GenArt aficionados – by its beauty, Life in West America resonated with people regardless of their experience with AI. There was nothing to “understand.” It let its beauty speak for itself. This pushed further up prices for AI art which had already been on a tear since the AI arms race broke out in October 2022. Prices for the top-10 collections surged 2X. BrainDrops Day 1 collections went up 3X. Launched only two weeks ago, Pindar’s new series byteGANs is up 6X from its mint price and became the #1 most traded AI art collection. Claire Silver sold her second 1/1 for $90,000 (52.69Ξ) – third highest sale for 1/1 art in February. (Learn more in this most comprehensive AI art deep dive.)
Challenging artist royalties is eroding the core ethos of digital art: In 2020, a group of digital artists including XCOPY and Matt Kane first publicly pushed marketplaces to enforce royalties for their work. But the battle continues as OpenSea – challenged by Blur and other zero-fee NFT marketplaces – reversed its stance on enforcing creator royalties. (Read more in business x blockchain.) Royalties are the #1 reason artists were drawn to NFTs in the first place. Percent of secondary sales allowed amazing artists like Tyler Hobbs and Dmitri Cherniak – who grossed $500,000 from primary sales of their genesis collections, but earned $20M in royalties from secondary sales – further push the boundaries of their creativity and contribute to the global digital art movement. An end to the culture of NFT royalties would be the end of a golden age for digital art on the blockchain. Major art platforms like Art Blocks and upstarts like Transient Labs immediately responded that they would not only honor royalties, but recognize and reward collectors who do the right thing. (This thread by Erick Calderon is a must read.)
Digital art making its way to the mainstream: In February, LACMA in Los Angeles and Centre Pompidou in Paris broke new ground by acquiring their first digital artworks on the blockchain. LACMA received 22 digital artworks thanks to a generous gift from pseudonymous collector Cozomo de’ Medici (learn more about Cozomo in this interview with Christie’s). Centre Pompidou acquired 18 artworks – from 13 prominent French and international artists – the result of a joint effort between scientific and administrative teams from the French Ministry of Culture and the museum. “With works spanning 2017 to 2022, the collection reflects a boom of artistic experimentation with blockchain that have been budding since the 2010s,” said LACMA CEO Michael Govan. “This collection reaffirms our support for artists in their conquest of new means of expression, which is the foundation of modern art,” noted the Pompidou director Xavier Rey.