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NFT Player: No one has it. We're just passing by

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They come from fields as diverse as AI, blockchain, digital art, and cyberpunk, and they're all part of the NFT art craze.

Title: NFT Players: No One Has It, We're Just Passengers

Original source: Slingway Noon Story

They come from fields as diverse as AI, blockchain, digital art, and cyberpunk, and they're all part of the NFT art craze.

March 11, 2021, may be a date in art history. On the same day Christie's auctioned off an NFT by an artist named Beeple for $69.34 million. It's a number that surprised the art world and shocked the world. In 2015, a painting by Impressionist Monet called "Water Lilies" sold at auction for just $54 million.

Who is the little-known Beeple? What is the so-called NFT? All kinds of information gradually ferments from the blockchain circle and penetrates into the wider population. What kind of artists and collectors are at play behind the wave of NFT auction news?

"Everydays -The First 5000 Days", which was auctioned on March 11, had a base price of $100. It quickly crossed The $1 million mark within 10 minutes of being on The shelves and soared from $10 million to $20 million by The closing day. To the surprise of many participants, a mystery buyer outflanked the crowd at the last minute with a price tag of nearly $60 million.

Beeple, the artist of this piece, was a designer who drove a used Toyota until recently. His real name is Mike Winkelman, and since May 2007 he has been producing one painting a day, mostly design sketches using the Cinema 4D program, gradually shifting from rough cubes to dytopian visions of the future. The First 5000Days is just a compressed pixel image of his 5,000 days and nights of work. With the sale, Beeple became the third most expensive living artist in the world, behind Jeff Koons and David Hockney. The former has repeatedly broken records for a living artist sold at auction, while the latter, along with Andy Warhol, is considered the "godfather of British art".

What many people don't understand is that while traditional art auctions sell mostly physical objects, Beeple sells a digital picture. Is the buyer crazy to buy a picture that can be reproduced indefinitely? Insiders will tell you that, exactly, that's not the digital picture, it's an NFT.

The full name for NFT is non-fungibletoken. In the case of an NFT auction, what the buyer buys is actually a proof of ownership. If a "property ownership certificate" proves that you legally own a house; NFT, then, is a technical way to prove that you own a work of art. This right is authorized and granted by the author, and is warranted by the immutable blockchain technology. A painting can be appreciated by tens of millions of people for free, but this is just a kind of right to use, while a painting has only one ownership, which can only be sold by the author to the buyer, who then passes on to the next. The NFT is proof of this ownership.

Along this line of thought, all symbols with symbolic significance can be turned into NFT for auction. So, in recent days, we've seen everything from a great photo of an NBA player to the first tweet from the founder of Twitter, from a Time magazine cover to an article in the New York Times turned into an NFT auction.

Another thing to note is that most NFT auctions are priced in ETH (cryptocurrency), and the implication of these high prices is that the buyers are mostly big players in the crypto world who don't care about the penny. Beeple, at the center of the vortex, is less confident about crypto assets, however. After the auction, he immediately put all his crypto assets into dollars. In an interview with Fox, he said the price of NFT was definitely a bubble.

There are also a lot of NFT players in China, and here are two artists and a collector we talked to.

Sleepy: At least I can do a little better than that

Satoshi Nakamoto's Whimsical Ideas

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Pointing to the tattoo on his hand, Sleepy explains that the calla lily symbolizes purity and eternity, which is his view of love. Wrath, the symbol for WRATH, reminded him to look at the world with sharp eyes. The tiger's head is because his zodiac sign is the tiger. Born in 1998, Sleepy is a typical Generation Z. She grew up in Haidian and went to university in Fengtai. She speaks with a Beijing accent.

Like many young people, he had hip-hop music playing on his headphones. He has been listening to HIPHOP since he was a child. He started to apply for setting up a HIPHOP club in the first year of junior high school. However, after six years, he still hasn't applied for it after graduation. While at college, Sleepy continued to apply, but bad news from the entertainment industry added another hurdle. So he and his friends set up an underground HIPHOP organization, which grew and became well known throughout the campus of the Capital University of Economics and Business. They like that a few Hiphop singer can be lifted the ban, students junior can set up an official Hihpop community? Gradually, he no longer cared about these problems.

Sleepy majored in auditing when he was in college. His teacher told them a little bit about blockchain in class, and he took it to heart.

The audit major of the first economic and trade school is one of the trump card majors, and is located in Beijing, the employment rate and whereabouts are good every year. As an intern in his junior year, he went to a famous accounting firm to do annual audit work. This kind of internship is a rare opportunity for most students. However, after experiencing it, Sleepy finds that what outsiders see is the aura and beauty of this profession, while what he feels is the tiredness of work, from which he can not find the interest of life.

After thinking about it for a long time, Sleepy decided that writing articles and exporting ideas would make him happy, so he went to work as a reporter for a blockchain media company. Sleepy first heard the term NFT in 2020 as she was just starting her career. With strong curiosity, he went to the NFT auction platform and had a look. Suddenly he sighed: "Many people's works are so bad, why can they still sell them?"

NFT art is a new creature, and the threshold of its production is not high, despite those tedious concepts. Many people even put some "works" that are not even graffiti on the auction platform to make a scene. However, most platforms are not strict with the review of artists and works in the initial stage, so naturally they will not refuse anyone.

Sleepy thinks he can write, too. "At least I can make something a little better than what they do." Having taught himself drawing software in college, he picked up those skills. In September 2020, Sleepy put its first NFT work up for auction. Like all the NFT works that can only be described as memes and ghost characters, the auction began, and his work gradually sank into the vast sea of art library. But Sleepy isn't too disappointed. As he says, it's just a hobby, and he doesn't live off NFT.

On weekdays, he continues to focus on the crypto art world, one of the areas he covers in his work.

In February 2021, out of sheer joy, his first NFT was sold, followed by a second and a third. The Mona Lisa with code, the huge whale flying in the sky, the oil painting version of Nakamoto, these NFT full of the flavor of cryptopunk were picked up by the buyers one by one. He began to rank among NFT artists and amassed tens of thousands of dollars worth of crypto assets, much to the surprise of his mother.

Not only does Sleepy make NFT, he also collects works that he likes. "There is no trick, meet lovely, like to collect." He thinks the NFT market will be like Taobao in the future, slowly beginning to differentiate: there are high-end, expensive luxury goods, and there are mass arts and crafts. Of the NFT's wealth effect, he said, "A guy who went from $10 to $1 million is the story that everyone loves to read and the media loves to write about." He does not reject these simple and brutal narrative techniques. "I think what NFT needs now is to let more people in, just like the e-commerce platform. Only when more users come in, can the ecology be improved."

As a creator, Sleepy sees NFT as just a platform to showcase his work. He didn't want to make money on it. Growing up in Beijing, he felt less pressure than most young people who fall into the trap of being trapped inside. "A job that wasn't too stressful, with space to do what I love, was my ideal life," he said.

On March 15, he posted a message on his Moments, and he is currently ranked 1,829 in the NFT Art House, with his next goal being the top 1,500.

Reva: I got it when I first saw the Bitcoin White Paper

The first interview with Reva, she declined. She later told me that she had some anxiety symptoms, turned down all offers and returned home to Shenzhen. After NFT's new thing caught fire, she was flooded with people asking for interviews and advice. "It was very stressful and even a little scary." After taking some time off, Reva chose to face the prying eyes from the outside again.

In the shot, Reva is wearing a patchwork headscarf and large, thin glasses that make her smile sheepishly. She is a hakka, who calls her father but likes to call her "father" by people from the north. She can find many small ideas in her seemingly simple makeup, such as blue glaze earrings and light eye makeup. Her voice is full of a sense of youth, so she can't guess her age.

In the already niche NFT art world, Reva occupies an even more niche niche. She started working on NFT in August 2020. She describes her creative direction as algorithmic art: using computer code to synthesize a series of works of art. There are very few artists working in this field. In September, the first NFT of her career hit the shelves, and a day later, a mystery collector bought it for half an ETH (about $200 at the time), and her work began to sell one by one. Last week, she was contacted on Twitter by an artist in India who also likes algorithmic art. Coinciding with the changing situation between China and India, the two sides hit it off and decided to conduct an international exchange and cooperation in the field of art.

She went to the front door to shoot some footage, and made music with the noise of the crowd in places where there were many people. I also took pictures of the vast white snow in Beijing, hoping to mirror the natural scenery of India. As a result, when the work came out, none of the materials I liked were used. There was regret in her voice as she told the story. She laughs when talking about the interactive art she particularly wants to try, such as writing code to control light shows on the spot, or even writing music.

Reva's pursuit of creation comes from the bottom of her heart. When she was a child, she studied painting in the Children's Palace. While other students left one after another, she kept sticking to it. She was the last one in her class. In the kindergarten, other children draw blue sky white clouds small house, she draws her favorite Japanese beautiful girl. The teacher complained to his parents: "The child's drawing of a man with thin arms and thin legs must be corrected." She changed it in class and did it in private.

Her teacher had asked her if she wanted to take the art exam. Facing the exam of junior high school, Reva did not understand what the art exam was and did not tell her parents, so she chose to take the normal exam. After middle school and high school, her parents were more concerned about her study, and painting became a little secret in the rebellious period.

She studied information security in college, which had nothing to do with art, but the term "blockchain" first entered her world. The information security major involved a large number of cryptography theories, which is also the basis of blockchain technology, which foreshadowed her rapid understanding of NFT later. In her words, "The first time I saw the Bitcoin White Paper, I got it."

And the painting never stops. On the popular Renren website before 2008, where she created a character called "Son of Summer," she updates a stick figure every day with her quirky ideas, such as "Eternity is made up of countless moments, but every moment is eternal." In college, as long as it is related to painting activities and clubs, she did not miss.

In graduate school, her fine arts skills finally came to fruition when she took the entrance exam for a virtual reality class at the Chinese Academy of Sciences. She did not do well in the written test. During the interview, she dragged her tutor through some of the work she had done in college. The other brothers are typical programmers who focus on algorithm technology and theoretical knowledge, and produce models that are not aesthetic at all. Good art skills make Reva's works stand out.

Reva, who graduated from the Chinese Academy of Sciences with a master's degree in virtual reality in 2012, is working as an algorithm engineer at China Film Group. In 2016, known as the first year of VR, venture capital flooded in, and she joined a start-up company to do technology development. As VR fever passed, capital that could not find landing opportunities flooded into AR field, and REVA also changed its direction accordingly. After two years of working on AI, she quit her job, became a freelancer, and wanted to move into art.

In her opinion, if VR turns to AR, the development direction can be said to be in the same line, but from AR to AI, it doesn't make sense technically. "Is this transformation really about technology? I'm a little disappointed."

In addition, programmers often work at a 996 pace and it is late at night when she goes home every day. Lose her living space, she can only stay up late to watch videos in exchange for a sense of control of life, in overtime and rush, she can not care about things outside work. "I feel like I've lost my humanity."

Even with the scarcity of algorithmic engineers and six years of technology development experience, Reva was willing to forgo a big salary and the resources he had accumulated in the past. After thinking at home for more than a year, she decided to dive into the fine arts -- the world she had dreamed of since childhood. It just used to be called art or design. Today it's called NFT art. She remembers that in 1994, when Sailor Moon premiered in Hong Kong, Japanese anime became popular in Shenzhen. Reva, who is in second grade, went to the Children's Palace to learn how to draw. "Can you hold on?" the father asked. And she said, I can.

Cao Yin: My current avatar is Yayoi Kusama

Empty house

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Song Ting - The Tower of Babel

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Beijing, shrouded in sandstorms, exudes something of a sci-fi wasteland, while Dali, far to the southwest, is as clear as ever.

Cao Yin was interviewed in a hotel on a hurried trip. As one of the most influential people in his circle, he has many titles: founder of a fund, digital currency adviser to Estonia's central bank, NFT evangelist, veteran media reader... There is also a name rarely seen in the Chinese language world - NFT collector.

"Art has two lives, once in the artist who created it, once in the artist who collected it." Cao Yin said. Most NFT artists are obsessed with creating, and collectors' interests will depend on whether their work will sell once it hits the shelves. One is the creator, the other is the ferryman.

Because of her deep understanding and rich experience in NFT art, Cao Yin is well liked by NFT artists at home and abroad, and some foreign artists even sell their works only to Cao Yin. "They care a lot about who gets their work, and some artists don't need money at all. They need people who can appreciate their work." Every day, emerging artists send Cao private messages on Twitter or via telegraph, telling him about their ideas and asking him to give them a textual interpretation of their abstract works.

As for NFT art collection, Cao Yin has initially established several directions of concern. In his mind, NFT is about the innovation of art history, and the works he collects are full of his understanding of beauty. As a result, his profile pictures have become a showcase for his collection of artists. The current avatar is Yayoi Kusama, a legendary Japanese artist whose work often features "polka dots," psychedelic and vertigo, and Cao Yin is generous in his praise of her.

Cao Yin was born in finance and worked at Cinda Securities for many years. In 2015, the National Energy Administration asked him to do a research project on the combination of energy industry and Internet model. He pioneered the concept of blockchain technology into research topics. After the project, Cao Yin and his colleagues started a blockchain business, and later cooperated with IBM to establish one of the earliest blockchain energy laboratories in China.

There is a huge potential opportunity to apply blockchain technology to the energy sector, but it is too early. Coincide with the downturn in the market, Cao Yin went to Europe to do research, write books, study Tours, investment, from Berlin to Estonia, he met many avant-garde art friends, began to collect cryptographic art. He loves Berlin the most and thinks the art scene there is great. After the outbreak of the epidemic, people can not move, online encryption art caught his eye.

Talk to the historical significance of NFT, Cao Yinjin sentence, he tried to stand in the perspective of human art history to understand the birth of NFT and encryption art and hot, he thinks this is a paradigm revolution, breaking the traditional art in sha-lu pyramid hierarchical structure, promote the development of the art of parity, and become a collector is one of the best ways to witness history.

"Green Bottle" is one of the works in his collection. It was created by a Nigerian artist named Osinachi. Osinachi was both a painter and a writer, and his work covered subjects such as homosexuality, women and people of color, often with characters without eyes.

Cao Yin made an in-depth interpretation of the work, saying that alcoholism and music choices have a profound impact on male behavior. He also cited the concept of Toxic Masculinity (a hot word on social media in the United States).

"At first glance, Osinachi works with another African portrait artist Amoako Boafo similar. But the difference is that Osinachi created a new visual language, which is not only a work very rare use office word (office), and photo collages to creation, and, more importantly, the theme of the protest and struggle throughout all of his paintings. If art attaches great importance to the aesthetic in the 19th century, the art of the 20th century attaches great importance to all kinds of complexity of the concept of integration, Emerging era of art is decided by the collective consciousness of contemporary art in the 21st century should be to fight for freedom. To the status Osinachi works of art, like his novels: is expressed, record, display and let people contact with contemporary Nigeria and Africa's new style. Although he didn't draw the eye the character, but seemed to open a window for people, he can let us through his point of view to see the works of ordinary people in Nigeria and Osinachi own experience."

There are many professional terms in Cao Yin's art criticism, which should be a kind of expression style that both the art circle and the crypto circle yearn for. Of course, he has also said that this is his hobby, and that his main role is as the founder of the Digital Renaissance Foundation, with investment and incubation as his main business.

Is NFT a hobby or an investment? Mr. Cao replied that he had taught a friend how to collect, but that he was more concerned about having a big income return. "I never saw it as an investment, because I started from a personal preference."

He believes that art is a matter of emotion, but investment needs to be rational. At night, in the online mutual aid group, Cao Yin said that he would hold an NFT exhibition in Shanghai and invited everyone to participate. Excited artists suddenly opened the chatterbox, asking the registration requirements and related matters. Cao Yin replied one by one, grass between the head of the body continues to appear, red hair particularly eye-catching.

Some have called NFT "crypto art," a "concept" in progress, the first book on the field yet to be written, and there is no history to write about. We've seen a lot of people coming out of artificial intelligence, blockchain, digital art, cyberpunk, new media and other places to squeeze into the crowded NFT community. They're young, they're talented, they're dressed up, they're having fun...