| Popis: |
In 2021, the concept of NFTs gained worldwide attention when a digital artist known as ‘Beeple’ sold his work Everydays: The First 5000 Days for 69 million US dollars at Christie’s, placing him among the top three living artists by sale value (Kastrenakes 2021). Since then, “non-fungible token” (or “NFT”) has rapidly become a high-scoring term on Google Trends and there has been corresponding growth in the number of artists, collectors, and platforms dealing with NFTs.Because of the many NFT platforms, the enormous volume of NFTs, the involvement of various cryptocurrencies, the fluctuating prices, and unpredictability of trends, navigating the NFT art market is very complicated. In an attempt to engage in this new sphere of speculation (and to speculate about it), we opened a physical NFT Shop at an abandoned gas station. Besides NFT art, we offered conversation and warm coffee to visitors. Surprisingly, we found almost everyone we met had heard about NFTs, although few demonstrated any in-depth knowledge. Our NFT Shop was expressly concerned with displaying only ‘clean’ NFTs, thereby underlining the environmental impact of typical blockchain technology. Tezos, a cryptocurrency known as a clean and eco-friendly ‘crypto’, is gaining popularity in the NFT art market as an alternative to Ethereum, which has a high carbon footprint (McDonald 2021) and high minting cost. According to Memo Akten’s A guide to eco-friendly CryptoArt, the cost of transactions in Ethereum fluctuates between $100-$1000 (Akten 2021), which is in stark contrast to Tezos, where exchange fees are currently below a dollar. The high energy consumption of blockchain has generated strong opposition, especially among artists. Thus, many alternative NFT platforms such as objkt and fx(hash) use Tezos and brand themselves as an eco-friendly and affordable marketplaces.Despite the availability of relatively clean cryptos, many digital artists prefer not to be associated with CryptoArt of any kind. At the same time, the general audience for art largely assumes that all digital art is NFT art. From the perspective of digital artists, it is difficult to say whether NFTs are a blessing or a curse. On the one hand, the art market has become receptive to digital formats, so many artists now have the opportunity to make a living from their art. On the other hand, there remains much that seems ‘unclean’ about NFT markets, although all transactions are entirely transparent. In this context, this paper and our art project NFT Shop aim to offer a framework for making sense of the NFT marketplaces and thus help to demystify the concepts of NFT and related platforms. |
