When Andy Warhol's works become NFT, will the traditional art market incline to NFT?

Comment: 0x13, beat BlockBeats

The mood for NFT players gets more complicated on June 24, when Binance NFT, the top crypto trading platform, officially launches its NFT platform.

At that time, the NFT market was very weak. The 24-hour trading volume of OpenSea plummeted from the peak of $23.13 million on May 4 to only $4.66 million on June 24, a decline of nearly 80%. In the depressed NFT market, people are looking for a game breaker. After Binance NFT was officially launched, the most attention was paid to the "Genesis" auction jointly organized by Binance, TRON and Apenft Foundation. The most famous artwork in the auction was "Three Self-Portrait" created by famous pop artist Andy Warhol. The work also lived up to expectations, with bids reaching $2.8 million at the time of writing.

Andy Warhol has been called the "father of pop art" and was a prominent figure in the art world, with a greater impact on popular culture than few people. Its ideas also contributed greatly to the subsequent rise of the Internet, and still have an important influence on the current trend of thought on the Internet. And the auction of his masterpiece "three self-portraits" also caused a great shock in the market.

On June 26, content creators created a video about Andy Warhol, pop art and the three-way auction on People's Daily's YouGov.cn. In addition, content creators from Bilibili, Douyin and other major traffic platforms have also joined the ranks of creating popular science videos, which shows its great influence in the screenshots of popular science videos released by the creators of People.com video.

Screenshot of popular science video released by the creator of People's Video

Reading this, you may be curious about this auction, Binance launched NFT trading platform, isn't it? How could an Andy Warhol be auctioned?

Last seen at Christie's auction house in April, "Three Self-Portraits" was sold by TRON founder Sun Yuchen for $2 million and was donated in May to his favored Apenft Foundation to support "art + blockchain" innovation. The "Three Self-Portraits" at auction is the NFT's version of art.

NFT of traditional art

Apenft is a foundation that focuses on the field of NFT. Most of its team members are from traditional art institutions such as Christie's and Sotheby's, with rich industry experience. In addition to "regular operations" such as investing and laying out NFT platforms and works, and incubating NFT artists, Apenft Foundation also pays attention to the field of traditional art. In its white paper, the Apenft Foundation says it will "provide a bridge for traditional top artists to enter NFT," and to do so, the foundation's primary focus will be on the NFT of traditional art.

Before this, we have also seen some cases of "NFT of traditional art works". Although the works of street art pioneer Banksy and the master of hyperrealism Leng Jun have been "NFT", the original works have also been burned. It is also the main reason why these two "NFT of traditional art works" have been criticized.  

The biggest difference between Apenft's approach and theirs is that Apenft will not destroy the original works. After the end of this three-way cooperative auction, the final collector of Three Self-Portrait will still get the original works kept by Apenft. In their opinion, the original works of art are as important as NFT.

  3. Three Self-Portraits by Andy Warhol

This move also made Apenft gain a relatively good reputation in the field of traditional art. Sun Yuchen, the founder of Tron, was even more outspoken in an interview with Rulse: "Although NFT can give art a digital second life, there is no need to burn the original work for this, and any artwork is a treasure of human civilization." Although Sun Yuchen is a collector from the crypto world to the traditional world, these words also speak for those in the traditional art world: "Every treasure of human civilization should be treated well."

Apenft's "NFT of traditional art" is not to let people choose between physical and digital works, but to add a layer of digital protection to physical art works, and improve the liquidity of traditional art market while protecting works of art.

Although the NFT of traditional art is not desirable in the eyes of many crypto native artists and collectors, they do not support it, but in the case of the rapid decline of the NFT market, perhaps only to find a way to break the circle is the only way out.

IP circle breaking lack of staying power

Let's take a look at how NFT art has broken through before.

In the two or three years since the birth of crypto art platforms such as SuperRare in 2018, although the market size of crypto art has been increasing year by year, it still belongs to a more niche subset in the niche field of crypto world. At that time, various crypto art platforms are closely related, but they all have little profit.

Time to come to 2020, Nifty Gateway was acquired by the Winklevoss brothers ushered in a rapid development. Unlike other NFT platforms, the Nifty Gateway fights traffic wars from the start. The team of Nifty Gateway knows very well that the traffic in the small circle of NFT has already been carved up. Only by breaking the circle and introducing more traffic from the outside world can the platform stand on its own feet.  

Therefore, Nifty Gateway recruited artists already famous on other crypto art platforms to seize the market in the circle. On the other hand, it cooperated with celebrities outside the circle and IP to launch NFT art collection, so as to play the fan economy, which greatly increased the transaction volume. Since December 2020, Nifty Gateway has never traded less than 50% of the total crypto art traded each month.

Image: Cryptoart.io

However, no matter from the above figure or the above, the crypto art market is also from the upsurge quickly calm down, IP play method seems to be more and more ineffective, celebrity sales of NFT in the secondary market break is common, and even some NFT is not sold at all.

In fact, when we deeply analyze why the IP effect of NFT artworks is getting weaker and weaker, we will find that the so-called "breaking circle" by introducing IP is not the "NFT circle", but the "art circle". What we break is the definition of "art". After all, many celebrities and IP are not artists. Naturally, their works are not suitable to be called "art". They are more fashionable than art. Obviously, works without art are not popular on the "art platform".

The real "broken ring".

How do we break the "NFT circle"?

As an art trading platform, a larger proportion of the audience must be art lovers, so to break the circle or from the perspective of "art".

Today's cryptography native NFT art level is uneven, although there is no lack of very good, by the world's top auction house selected works of art, but more works in the traditional art field people see the quality is far from reaching the standard as "art". Rhythm once showed a cryptographic art work to Li Xiu, a member of the Chinese Artists Association and a Chinese painter, and got a very explicit evaluation: "This kind of thing can't be called a painting at all." This is how most crypto art looks to people in the traditional art world.

But the traditional art field is another piece of cake that can not be thrown away.

Compared to the crypto art market, the traditional art market is much larger. In 2019, before the COVID-19, a total of 550,000 works of pure art were sold at auction worldwide, according to the 2019 Annual Art Market Report jointly published by the Artron Art Market Monitoring Center (AMMA) and the French art house Artmarket (formerly Artprice). Total turnover was $13.3 billion. According to data from Cryptoart.io, the Cryptoart market has generated only $600 million in total transactions since its inception, less than one-twentieth of the annual turnover of traditional art.

It's a fascinating statistic. Ten billion dollars is just the market size before NFT is fully accepted in the traditional art field, not to mention that before and after NFT is accepted cannot be calculated simply by addition. With the help of NFT technology, works of art that cannot be traded or collected before, such as buildings, large-scale installations, street art and performance art, will also become tradable and collectable, which will raise the scale of the whole market to a higher level. Not to mention, after attracting people to accept NFT technology through art, NFT of all the physical assets in our life will bring great changes to the whole market.

Only the gems at the top of the pyramid can attract the fierce traditional art collectors, which is why Apenft chose to auction Andy Warhol's Three Self-Portraits instead of the works of crypto artists such as Beeple and Pak. Although Beeple's works are also impressive enough, But it's still not the brightest gem by comparison.

In addition to attract "whale" traditional art collectors, auction also take care of all the three parties this time by ordinary people groups in traditional art lovers, although their wealth isn't enough to let them take "three self-portrait", but can still be snapped up 100 picture by an artist community to traditional art "three self-portrait" as inspiration to create works of art, And 300 re-creations inspired by Dali's engravings of Dante's "Divine Comedy" with some encrypted elements.

Andy Warhol's "Three Self-Portraits.

虽然这些作品从价值上讲无法比肩原作，但这其实是让艺术飞入寻常百姓家的第一步，每一个人都有收藏艺术、欣赏艺术、享受艺术的权力，艺术不应该只有高高在上和阳春白雪。而且更多人也将会由此接触到 NFT 技术，认识到这项技术可以和艺术结合，再进一步认识到这项技术可以用于所有资产，而这将成为他们走向未来世界的第一步。  

While NFT as a digital credential is only the most basic of its functions, it is still a difficult door to open for those who are not familiar with this emerging technology, and there is a very high bar to be set.

而将传统艺术品 NFT 化的尝试便是帮助人们推开这扇大门的钥匙，吸引着更多人加入这里，入门之后的他们将会看到一个更加广阔绚烂的 NFT 世界。在那里，NFT 不仅仅可以用于艺术品、实物资产，甚至还可以用于治理、金融，进而对加密世界形成摒弃掉偏见的、全面的认知，理解加密精神，成为一名加密世界的常住居民。

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