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We looked at all the crypto artists and works on SuperRare, and these styles were the most popular

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Overall, the average price of NFTs with "Bitcoin" or "Ethereum" tags is lower

In Search Of An Aesthetic Of Crypto Art

Original source: Artnome

By Alex Estorick, Kyle Waters and Chloe Diamond

About the author

Alex Etorick, Art and technology contributing editor at Flash Art, created The magazine's digital column, The Uncanny Valley, which focuses on The relationship between artificial intelligence and contemporary Art.

Kyle Waters is a data scientist who works in the arts, technology and machine learning. He has been a regular contributor to ArtNome since 2018, and his most recent work has focused on the social dimension of NFT collections.

Chloe Diamond is a writer and curator at the Museum of Contemporary Digital Art (MOCDA), specializing in blockchain, data and art. She is dedicated to documenting and advancing the development of digital art through the insights and education of curators.

Some of SuperRare's highest-grossing crypto art

We delved into the history of artwork on SuperRare's crypto art platform, and here's what we found (data as of the end of March 2021).

- Futurism, retro, science fiction and other themes are the most frequently viewed by collectors, and these crypto art works are highly sought after.

- "3D Art" is the most viewed and traded category, perhaps because it best fits the nature of the crypto art medium, NFT.

- In general, page views are highly correlated with price.

- Like the traditional art world, NFT with the "manuscript" label tends to sell at a lower price.

- The crypto artwork tends to be more purplish overall, emphasizing an aesthetic rooted in nostalgia for old technology.

We want to use the available data to understand how NFT contributes to visual culture, not just as a means of financial investment and stratification. Moreover, the data may also be of interest to artists in the traditional field, who may wish to move to an art field that is less dependent on intermediaries than the traditional field. And they may bring with them some conceptual tools that might create more long-term value for crypto art.

Note:

This paper argues that the terms "crypto art" and "NFT art" are interchangeable. However, it is clear that not all digital (or physical) artworks associated with NFT can be called "art". As a result of the creation of more and more toenized collectibles, there has been a consensus that NFT art is unique, and that its value is determined by more than scarcity, just as traditional fine art has been distinguished from decorative arts for centuries. However, given democratic principles, any digital artist can in theory tokenize their creativity into NFT, so there is much debate about whether the distinction is still appropriate in this case. Then someone pushes NFT art into another niche, where only some works can enter, which means that there is an injustice in hierarchy and structure.

Therefore, we use the term "crypto art" to mitigate this problem because we accept the possibility that all creative works related to NFT can be called NFTART. This also solves the problem that the primary interest in NFT art is curiosity about the concept of NFT rather than the work of the artist. At the same time, "crypto art" covers a wide range of creative approaches that may contribute to a healthier and broader ecosystem. Thus, it acknowledges that while the aesthetic of crypto art should also be examined, its associated privilege of artistic originality is no longer sufficient in evaluating art today.

In effect, the storage limits of the blockchain determine whether the works themselves are stored on-chain (such as Autoglyphs) or off-chain (such as CryptoPunks). But we think these collections are very different from NFT art. Therefore, this paper will distinguish between artistic creation and mass-produced NFT in the market.

The research vision

The motivation of this article is that aesthetic issues have so far been ignored in mainstream reports on NFT. Although given the exponential growth of the NFT market and the intense debate over the environmental costs of crypto art, it's not unusual for people to overlook this. But it also gives us an opportunity to analyze aesthetic issues from a statistical perspective, rather than the often subjective comments people make about art. We hope to start a conversation about aesthetics in a way that acknowledges the historical value of aesthetic concepts, while at the same time prompting us to become more aware of the creative process behind crypto art. At the end of the day, the aesthetic debate is not about the simple "What is good cryptographic art?" ", but "What is cryptographic art?" "Because without a frame of reference that all parties can agree on, those who control the market will decide what crypto art is and who is left out.

Therefore, to explore the aesthetics of crypto art, it is necessary to examine the current criteria by which crypto artists and collectors distinguish NFT art, not just digital art that has been toKEN. This is extremely important, because it shows a recognition that crypto artists have different skills and levels, and that their talents are far removed from those favored by traditional art institutions. This is what artists have been calling for, hoping to be on an equal footing with traditional art, rather than the craze for "tokenization".

About data

With support from Artnome, Flash Art, and Mocda (contemporary digital Art museum), our team specifically studied the vast amount of data associated with the SuperRare trading platform. We chose SuperRare because of its overall market share and its huge influence in popularizing crypto art collections. Of course, a market is more than the sum of artists and collectors, and the fact that SuperRare's approach to assessing artists' applications reinforces the continuing role of gatekeepers in defining the boundaries of art's legitimacy. As a result, we had to accept a biased sample based on the curators at SuperRare, and were also limited by the forms of art currently supported.

However, the sample of 22,018 entries was large enough for us to prioritize the various key pieces. Although the market as a whole is relatively young, a community of artists and collectors is committed to ensuring that the quality of the art circulating on the market is stable and rare. The fact that all of SuperRare's NFTs are released as single releases, compared to other trading platforms, also underscores the attitude that aesthetics precedes mass production, and quality precedes quantity. However, in the long run, this attempt to see SuperRare as a "quality guarantor" depends on a mutual understanding of quality. Judging from the data, it seems that one can define such an abstract concept in a written form.

What are the labels of artists?

We considered the role of labels, which can help people understand the art style that the artist often produces. Since the NFT market has now become a nexus of multidisciplinary artists from all areas of digital creativity, any style needs to be built on a foundation. So we tracked the relationship between an artist's label and the price their work sold for. In this way, we can make statistics on the styles of artists and the styles that collectors are interested in.

SuperRare Tab Network: Visual representation of 344,050 artist tag combinations

Visualized data from the above network records the labels chosen by each artist on SuperRare. It reveals the uniqueness of certain combinations of tags: for example, Robbie Barrat labeled his AI-Generated Naked Portrait #2 (2018) with the hashtags # Machinelearning and # Artificial Intelligence. This also shows the overall complexity of the relationships between tags. In total, there are 17,887 unique tags, and 34,450 unique tag combinations, indicating that artists tend to let collectors select them in a way that differentiates the style of their work. This is even more evident when we subdivide the network, such as the following sample of 1000 tag combinations.

The first 1,000 artists selected for the label combination of the segmented network.

Some tags appear very frequently.

The label most commonly chosen by artists is "3D", which is used in around 17% of SuperRare's entire portfolio. In addition, the top five in terms of the number of NFTs are "Abstract," "Animation," "GIF" and "Surreal," each accounting for about 10%. We focused on the top 50 labels by NFT, as well as the average selling price of the works using those labels.

Top 50 labels by number of NFT

'Sci-Fi' was the label with the highest average selling price, at about $7,394, and was often combined with 'Space,' another of the top 50 labels with a higher average selling price (about $5,730). The fact that '2D' and 'Surreal' are the second most expensive labels in the top 50, at around $6,000, reveals that aesthetics and subject matter are equally valuable to artists. 'Nude' was the most valuable label on the subject, at about $4,903, though 'portrait' was still more popular. These values may have been driven by Robbie Barrat's early dominance on the SuperRare platform, although it also suggests that male collectors may be more active.

Unsurprisingly, several blockchain and cryptocurrencity-related tags made the top 50, including "Bitcoin," "Blockchain," "Ethereum" and "ETH." Given NFT's historical relationship with Ethereum, such as the ERC-721 standard, one might expect Etherium-themed works to dominate the crypto art scene, but there are plenty of bitcoin-themed works out there as well.

Ethereum vs. Bitcoin: A portfolio network of work tags that includes the words "Bitcoin" or "Ethereum.

The network above explores the relationship between NFTs labeled "Bitcoin" and/or "Ethereum." The purple dots on the left represent tags that are only related to "Ethereum" but not "Bitcoin," while the orange ones on the right are tags that are related to "Bitcoin" but not to "Ethereum." The labels for both are in the green area in the middle. In the area of "Ethereum" alone, we found some of the usual tags in the Ethereum story -- such as "Decentalized Applications" and "0x" (prefix of the ETH address). The Bitcoin-only tag includes countless references to Bitcoin's creation story and Satoshi Nakamoto. What both have in common are themes that circulate throughout the crypto community, such as "hodl," "lambo," "fiat," and "blockchain." And the label V God, referring to the co-founder and leader of Ethereum, is often paired with Bitcoin and Ethereum -- perhaps a sign of rejection of Bitcoin supremacism. Overall, the average NFT price with the "Bitcoin" or "Ethereum" tag was lower ($1,814 and $1,263, respectively), indicating that these topics have become a bit of a cliche for the SuperRare community.

The "average" SuperRare NFT produced by mixing 22,018 works

Five of the top 50 tags were related to colour, although the specific colours were limited to 'red' and 'black', with red being slightly more expensive. To further explore the color palette, we blended the colors of the entire SuperRare platform to produce the image above, which is dominated by pastels of reds, pinks and purples, from the Rothko Institute for Data Visualization. The final color hints at sexual melancholy, a nostalgic nod to old-fashioned technology that fits the defining theme of the market. Add to this the popularity of "abstract," "psychedelic," and "surrealism," and it's ironic that this attempt at aesthetics ended up with a Web3 icon.

On the other hand, the emphasis on the production process can be seen in the frequency of the "2D" and "3D" tags -- from "3DAnimation" to "3DIllustration" to "3DRender", a total of 89 tags containing "3D" indicate that, New media is the best fit for crypto art. The 50 most popular tag samples also showed their impact on traditional impressions, and while five of the top ten were related to traditional art terms, 30 of them were not.

Some media critics, when considering a set of principles that today's media texts follow, choose to use the classical Greek term Techn in place of aesthetics. In reality, aesthetics was only the decisive aspect of Enlightenment art, before which technical quality and ritual function had dominated. Yet since Duchamp moved urinals from the bathroom walls to the floor of an exhibition space in New York, aesthetics have arguably not been a priority for art. This marked the birth of the avant-garde style of conceptual art and the beginning of a process of separation between art and aesthetics that lasted almost all of the 20th century.

The emergence of crypto art breaks the viewpoint that "art must have substance", thus expanding the attempt to dematerialize art objects. Today, aesthetics is only a part of the complex whole of "medium + token = crypto art". Nevertheless, in addition to price, hype and other factors, aesthetic evaluation is still an important basis for collectors to evaluate NFT. One thing crypto art has in common with the so-called traditional art market is that NFTs with the "manuscript" label tend to sell for a lower price ($2,216 on average). While these "manuscripts" are not meant to be final, they are often exquisite, revealing a potential mismatch between labels and their perceived value, a pity of the prehistoric days of crypto art.

What are collectors looking at?

Our analysis of collector page views and artist collections allows us to better quantify the preferences of all parties. SuperRare only counts the page views of the top 2,000 active collectors. In fact, a significant number of early collectors of crypto art were also artists, leaving the market with the impression that artists and collectors share a common set of standards.

Top 50 labels by number of NFT

Looking again at the top 50 tags, we found a high correlation between the average price of a tag and the average number of page views. It might work in one of two ways: the most popular NFTs are of higher quality and therefore have higher transaction prices, or the most expensive NFTs attract users who are more interested in the transaction results.

The works with more than 500 views were dominated by name-related tags, meaning that the hype surrounding individual artists and the time they spent on the platform was responsible for the price increase. The most viewed artists were Hackatao, Xcopy, Pak, Coldie and Robbie Barrat, and despite generating only 3.8% of SuperRare's NFT, they had a total of 116,544 views, That's 7.7% of all views at SuperRare.

Users on SuperRare can also select "thumb up" NFT works. Since you have to browse first to select a like, there is an inevitable correlation between page views and thumb ups. There are, however, some exceptions. Zomax's 6088AD (2021) had 109 thumb ups with only 1,224 views, which shows how powerful social media has been in driving demand. By comparison, Vitaly Bulgarov's The Last Token (2021) had 2,469 views, but only 55 thumb ups.

6088AD, Zomax, 2021

The Last Token, Vitaly Bulgarov, 2021

At the time of writing, only 14 NFT works on SuperRare have been viewed more than 1,000 times, and it's likely that these are crypto works of art that the SuperRare community considers "good." Yet, while Fewocious's work is less perfect than most, it is also highly regarded, evoking the Hoch-Guston hybrid. At the age of 18, Fewocious offers a glimpse of a world beyond the bounds of dogma. On the other hand, he uses endless loops of animation to keep viewers wandering between morbid curiosity and empty consumer psychology, which is at the heart of NFT.

3. "The Sailor," Fewocious, 2021

Aesthetic issues

In the last fifty years, fine art has been characterized by an increase in the use of mixed installations rather than works in non-traditional media, such as painting, sculpture, etc. In practice, this development has removed the old hegemonic role, but it has left the measurement of quality to the managers of the gallery system. This inevitably leads to a reliance on hype - to fill in the blanks with meaningless artistic language.

Thus, aesthetics, while useful, is still highly problematic because its premise is based on the "impartial" view of a supposedly neutral person, when in fact, this is only the view of elite white males. So critics of crypto art might argue that the same problem exists in crypto art, and of course it would take a long debate to argue for a kind of artistic "autonomy" that Theodor Adorno once tried to argue for in popular culture. If anything, crypto art is one of the most refined (or at least recent) creations of the cultural industry, represented by a diverse group of artists who have historically been excluded from the art world. The problem he faces is how to unlock NFT's potential to rescue a generation of digital creators from a life of precarious income.

The COVID-19 pandemic has completely flattened the sales of art displays and, more importantly, online platforms. On the one hand, this seemingly independent combination of image economy reveals the separation between contemporary art and popular culture. On the other hand, it has spurred the growth of the NFT market, where a new wave of sophisticated works can use blockchain to validate digital scarcity. As the playing field finally levels, it remains to be seen how the relationships between the different art markets and their voices will evolve. Our aim is to point to an approach beyond the status quo, in which speculation seems to be as much a driver of the value of the works of art as the works themselves.

In our view, the time has come to untangle crypto art from the derivative logic that has fueled contemporary art in recent years, and to replace it with a new set of key strategies. Perhaps with this in mind, Kanon is currently working with SuperRare on a project that would use smart contracts to reset the resale rights of artists, building on Seth Siegelaub and Robert Projansky's original vision.

Whether crypto art is ultimately defined by its nuances as a financial instrument rather than digital art remains to be seen. What is clear is that there is a dialectical tension between the two components, a tension that is likely to further exacerbate the divide between art and money.

In his book Digital Aesthetics (1998), Sean Cubitt points out that Aesthetics is shifting from ethics to the neoliberal needs of transnational financial capital. We believe that it is when art and money are closest that new forms of social experimentation are possible. As crypto art increasingly merges with the critical strategies of contemporary art, it has the opportunity to become a venue for critiques of crypto colonialism. Similarly, new media artists, game engine designers, and their peers will contribute to the creation of a new artistic ethic.

Maximum price: 130ETH ($251,916)

#09. Company Entrance, Mr. Misang, 2021

The specific quality that sets NFT art apart is its "medium specificity", which could make it a new, long-term art form rather than just a new asset class. Of course, the diversity of crypto art may have a lot in common with post-modernist art. Endless diversity should not be confused with cultural dynamism; It is simply a deep-rooted neoliberal numbness in which aesthetics and morality remain disconnected. One of crypto art's most important achievements to date has been to break through the illusion of contemporary art as a "high" cultural space. So don't repeat that mistake and become just another victim of hubris.