Editor's note: 2021 Beeple's "Every Day: The First 5000 Days" detonated the NFT for nearly $70 million, people from the initial ignorance to active participation, every day is creating heat and topics, but to this day, for practitioners in the art field, it is still difficult to understand the NFT, which can be seen from a large number of avatars and pictures of NFT works, and it is in this context that people think that the crypto art based on NFT technology has little value. It is nothing more than a digital reproduction of existing works, and then gradually lose interest in exploring this field.
On the other hand, the practice of creating based on blockchain technology is also happening, and at this point in time, we also have to reflect on what is the meaning of crypto art? Can blockchain be a medium for artistic creation? Can crypto art lead to the next Renaissance?
What's unique about Merge?
Recently, in the field of crypto art, one work has been repeatedly mentioned, that is, the NFT project "Merge" created by Pak, which sold for a high price of 91.8 million US dollars (about 584 million yuan), which also made the artist the third largest in the world in terms of the amount of work sold by living artists.
What is unique about Pak's "Merge"? It is so much talked about, from the creative form, the smallest unit of the work is Mass, the work is sold in unlimited quantities, anyone can buy any number of Mass, Mass can be understood as "Merge" tokens, that is, the buyer did not buy the actual Ethereum NFT, but bought the Mass tokens, which are combined after the sale to create a dynamic, unique NFT collection.
“Merge”
Visually, a Mass is a small ball, and the more the collector buys, the larger the ball he owns, and the work goes from sale to the end, eventually more than 30,000 digital addresses to buy.
In the view of Guo Cheng, a researcher of crypto art, the biggest difference from the picture chain is that Pak's work uses smart contract programming to achieve its combination of annexation, text generation, etc., although the final form delivered to the collector is still a picture, but the process of generation behind it is completely different. Works that take into account both the sense of form and blockchain technology envelop both art and technology.
Surely, who is Pak? Pak never made an appearance to be identified. Some people say that ta is banksy of web3, and there are even rumors that Pak is banksy's virtual identity in the web3 world.
Why can JPG be synonymous with NFT in the blockchain field
Guo Cheng said that Jpg is the name of the NFT in the blockchain field, and a picture plus a string of code becomes an NFT. Creators of artistic backgrounds are also involved, especially illustrators, designers, including graphic, 3D, CG animation creators, etc. Creators who were not previously considered art.
However, for an image of graphic design, 3D modeling, generative art, or even conceptual art creation, it is done before it is "on the chain". NFTs do not play a role in the narrative of these works except for digital certificates.
This also leads us to think that the development of art is accompanied by changes in technology.
When discussing the topic of art and technology, a few examples are often mentioned: the invention of the tin pipe prompted the Impressionists to go out of the studio and out into the outdoors. Photography has opened up new art categories, and "new media" from lighting and video to today's high-definition projection, algorithm generation, and human-computer interaction have been mastered by creators.
So, can blockchain become a medium for artistic creation?
Crypto Art Practices in 2021
Wang Xing is a crypto artist and the initiator of "digital compounds", in the latest forum he participated in to discuss crypto art, "Digital Age and Creativity: Crypto Art Practice in 2021", he also mentioned Pak's creation, and also believes that "Merge" has opened up a lot of possibilities, at the same time, he summarized the practice of crypto art in the past year with five keywords, which is more conducive to our understanding of the current situation of crypto art and whether blockchain can become a medium for artistic creation.
The first keyword Mentioned by Wang Xing is CG (image drawn by computer), in his view, CG first became the entry point of NFT, derived from its own characteristics, and the game industry, film industry, digital entertainment is particularly close. There is a very large audience base, whether it is fans, creators, works have a lot of precipitation, and the content is relatively easy to understand in contemporary art.
Every Day: 5,000 Days, created on February 16, 2021
The most representative work is Beeple's "Every Day: The First 5,000 Days", this work also directly triggered the NFT topic, Beeple's hottest time period of the main crypto art is completed in digital form, Wang Xing was also at that time ready to join the field of crypto art creation, although it was very ignorant at the time, but has vaguely felt that there seems to be something wrong with this thing.
That is, there are too many CG works, they are not worse than Beeple, which makes this type of work an infinite supply of things, from the asset level will be doomed to depreciate, at the same time, do not want pure art, with such a deep humanistic connotation, it is also so, in the middle of last year, everyone began to feel that CG is not a long-term fully expandable future of crypto art.
Wang Xing's second keyword is "avatar", which is known as Punk and boring apes, some people think that they are the standard form of crypto art, some people think that it is not, in Wang Xing's view, "avatar" projects answer three key questions, two of which are related to art: application and scene.
Here we will talk about the relationship between crypto art and the lives of coin people? What are the application scenarios of crypto art?
"Avatar" works provide the possibility that everyone has the same avatar, indicating that everyone has common values, and in the social media environment where it is particularly difficult to reach trust and tacit understanding, avatars become a medium of connection and trust between people and people.
《Loot》
It was also at this time that crypto art began to have the emergence of subjective thinking, but it was not enough, at this time, Wang Xing put forward a third keyword "conceptual art", he took the work "Loot" as an example, from the emergence of this work, people do not deeply bind crypto art and fine art, you can see that the concept is already the core part of the encrypted art work.
In Wang Xing's view, crypto art is promising to become conceptual art, and his own work "Digital Babel Library: Small Doors" is such a work, aimed at blockchain time, which is a concept independent of natural time.
Digital Babel Library: Small Doors
Then Wang Xing talked about the fourth key word "financial engineering", here he talked about "Merge", in Wang Xing's view, Pak's works are valued, in addition to the price factor, there is also a point that "he shows the entire financial market people for a subject matter of the game relationship, greed, fear of this human nature."
"Pak's work introduces a new artistic language to contemporary art, which is called financial engineering, and no one in art history has ever used financial engineering as an artistic language to create works of art.
It can be seen from here that people hope that art can do more artistic and humanistic expression in this field, and here we will mention "crypto native", which is also Wang Xing's next keyword.
In Wang Xing's view, the concept of "crypto native" has two main parts: using blockchain as an artistic language, that is, the work without blockchain cannot be completed; at the same time, crypto art should express the humanistic connotation of blockchain.
I've made money to put on a physical exhibition for everyone
Seeing this, everyone may have an understanding of the development process of NFT art and the problems and demands facing it at present, so does art creation based on the concept of "crypto native" exist in China?
In the "2021 Asian Digital Art Exhibition" held in 2021, there is a work that has attracted people's general attention, it is the "Contemporary Art Drive" created by the artist She Luyun, the original intention of the creation of the work is related to the artist's foreign experience, it is easy to understand the art works outside, but in China, many times it takes a lot of interpretation to understand, that is, when describing art or works, we must use some very empty, grand, artistic words, which is his creation of "Contemporary Art Drive" The prototype.
Contemporary Art Drive
She extracted all the words of artists, galleri galleries, critics, and curators, selected 100 high-frequency words from the three types of verbs, adjectives, and nouns, and then randomly combined them into a sentence that can guide people to do art in the order of verbs + adjectives + nouns.
These endless "ideas" randomly may have more than a hundred thousand different words, resulting in different information noise, and then someone suggested that she put the work into Taobao for sale, so she opened a Taobao store to sell slowly, during which a lot of interesting things happened, people in various fields came to buy, in 2021 she will turn this work into "Crypto Art Drive", not simply to encrypt an image upload, but through encryption technology so that more people can participate, Together, they facilitate the generation of a database.
In June, she will send a recruitment message to all those who have purchased Contemporary Art Drive:
"If you really made a work of art based on the ideas generated by Contemporary Art Drive, please submit it to me, and I will try to find a place to do an exhibition for everyone around October 1st." I've made money, and now I'm going to use it to make a real exhibition of contemporary art. ”
We can't just talk about crypto art
The practice of artists can see that crypto art is gradually deepening in depth and breadth, on the other hand, Yuan Yuan, a critic of contemporary art photography, said that we should also reflect on the mechanism of crypto art.
She cites the exhibition Proof of Work, which focuses on the environmental crisis of a mechanism like proof-of-work, whereby a transaction on the blockchain could cost as much as a month's electricity bill or more, which is entirely due to its mechanism.
The artist reflects on this problem in the way of the exhibition, the hollow composition of the bubble in the exhibition, and from another point of view, it is connected to a mining machine, and the fan air of the mining machine is rushing against this bubble. So if we only talk about crypto art and not about the environmental crisis caused by the whole mechanism, this is impossible. So now we're going to see responsible artists talk about it, at least about how to offset the carbon of the work, taking responsibility in the carbon marketplace, which is a basic ethic.
When we talk about crypto art now, we often only talk about the visual beauty or the part that has monetary value, and we don't see it in this bubble, we don't see it in the energy consumption of mining machines. We ignore the energy consumption part and the cost of reality, and such a work itself makes you see that the so-called "metacosm" is not virtual, in what sense is not virtual? Not virtual at the cost level! Because the "virtual cost" is paid for by the real world, this cannot be ignored.
At the same time, she also gives the example of Man in a Pool III by a Nigerian artist (Osinachi), which, although it looks like an ordinary painting, is indeed NFT art, which is in line with the original value of the chain on another level. Due to technical reasons, artists can only create word, the artist once took the work to the gallery, was rejected by the gallery, the gallery felt that the word work still want to be sold in the gallery?
The established art system completely shut out such young artists, and he later made his work into NFTs. Resignation ended up trading for almost $40,000-$60,000.
This shows why artists use NFTs? Such art was rejected by the traditional gallery system, and then seen by a wider range of people through the way of crypto art, from an artist oppressed by the existing art system to a new force, creating a scene.
Therefore, Yuan Yuan stressed that if we take the blockchain and the entire metaverse as a new scene, she believes that there is a basic principle: we can no longer copy the rules of power and capital in the real world. If the rules that oppress us in the real world are still replicated in the metaverse, why should we shape the metaverse? Still subject to double oppression?
She also said, what are we talking about about crypto art? It's still about people! Why do we do crypto art? Is it to sell money, useful value? If you just stay in making a man-made object, even if it is a virtual artificial object, is that what crypto art has to do?
The purpose of doing crypto art is to act as a field of social experimentation, in this sense, whether it is doing traditional art or doing crypto art, it is always related to the most basic human problems, seeking new languages, new materials, and thus bringing the possibility of human action.
Conclusion: Although there are still such and such problems in crypto art, as an emerging art form and possibility, the future undoubtedly has great potential and possibilities, especially under the concept of metaverse.
On March 26, 60 museum directors across the country jointly proposed that cultural and cultural institutions should actively participate in the construction of the meta-universe, and culture and art have natural advantages in this regard.
Therefore, in the future, whether the art ecology will be reconstructed is also unknown.