It’s also something artists themselves are clamoring for, as a way of rebalancing the debate away from a fetish for the token itself. This is important because it acknowledges the existence of different skillsets and levels of technical facility among the community of crypto artists, whose talents have been honed well away from traditional art institutions. The search for an aesthetics of crypto art therefore requires investigating the standards by which crypto artists, as well as collectors, currently distinguish works of NFT Art as more than simply digital artifacts that have been tokenized. Ultimately, what is at stake in the debate over aesthetics is not simply the question of “what makes good crypto art?” But “what is crypto art?” Since without a frame of reference on which all parties agree, those who control the market will invariably determine what constitutes crypto art itself, and therefore who gets excluded. When that craft also reflects a multitude of digital approaches it makes the question of aesthetics even more problematic, if no less intriguing. That one of the hallmarks of NFTs so far has been a kind of beguiling slickness may be one reason why the craft has gone largely unmentioned up till now. We have sought to start a conversation about aesthetics in a way which acknowledges the concept’s historical freight, while prompting us toward greater awareness of the creative toil behind crypto art. However, it offers an opportunity to ground the question of aesthetics in data, rather than the kind of lofty rhetoric often used to drive up prices artificially. Given the market’s exponential growth, as well as the urgency of debate surrounding crypto art’s environmental cost, this is perhaps unsurprising. One motivation for this study is that the issue of aesthetics has so far been overlooked in the mainstream commentary about NFTs. This text therefore seeks to disentangle the making of art from the manufacture of markets. We question whether such collectibles, despite being marketed separately from the vast majority of NFT Art, aren’t in fact its purest incarnation. In practice, the storage limitations of the blockchain dictate whether or not the work itself is stored “on chain”, as in the case of Autoglyphs, or “off chain”, as with CryptoPunks. It therefore accepts that, while an aesthetics of crypto art should prove useful, its associated privileging of artistic originality is no longer adequate when evaluating art today. At the same time, ‘crypto art’ is broad enough to encompass a variety of approaches, such as Plantoids, that seek to explore the blockchain as a wider ecosystem. It is also to remove the sense that the primary object of interest in NFT Art is the NFT itself, rather than the creative process. We use the term ‘crypto art’ therefore to alleviate this problem by accepting the possibility that all creative works issued with NFTs might be considered NFT Art. To then introduce a separate field of NFT Art into which only some works qualify automatically implies hierarchy and structural unfairness. Whether such segregation is appropriate in this instance, however, is highly contentious, given the democratic principle by which, in theory (and on Rarible), any digital artist can tokenize their creativity as an NFT. Given the increasing tokenization of collectibles, there is already some agreement that NFT Art stands apart and that its value depends on more than mere scarcity, in much the same way that traditional fine art was separated from decorative arts for centuries. However, clearly not all digital (nor indeed physical) artifacts tied to NFTs constitute NFT Art. This text considers the terms ‘crypto art’ and ‘NFT Art’ to be interchangeable. However, the data may also be of interest to traditional fine artists, who may be looking to migrate to an artistic arena less dependent on intermediaries than the contemporary art scene, and who might bring with them certain conceptual tools which could prove valuable to crypto art’s long-term future. Our premise has been that it stands to benefit crypto artists to be aware of their community’s aesthetic and thematic priorities. We have sought to identify, based on available data, what NFTs (non-fungible tokens) are actually contributing to visual culture beyond simply fuel for financial speculation and environmental extraction. The average color palette of NFTs tends toward purple, reinforcing an aesthetics rooted in technostalgia In general, number of views highly correlates with price: the hype machine is realĪs in the traditional art world, NFTs tagged with “drawing” tend to sell for less “3d” art is the most viewed with higher selling points, perhaps reflecting a ‘medium’ specific to crypto art This is what we found.įuturistic, retro and sci-fi themes are frequently explored and highly coveted by collectors We studied the historical data on works of NFT Art across the SuperRare marketplace*.
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