NFTs and Art and Crypto and People

This past week I spent some time researching everything crypto currency and art. I was following the visual artist, Beeple, before his first NFT collection was available and so I had heard about it a bit. I own zero crypto and I didn’t know anything on the funds end. I approached this crypto/nft movement from a research standpoint. What was strange was that I found everyone that had created a video on explaining crypto included the “This is not Financial Advice” statement in there. I quickly found how unpredictable the crypto market is being that it’s so new and so many newbies like me looking at jumping in.

Anyway, I was interested in creating an NFT out of my art and so I drew one piece where the Ethereum logo is resurrecting my stick-figure out of the ground after being dormant for a bit. I noticed a bunch of abstract art being sold on these NFT markets and I thought I would do the same and be a bit sarcastic about Basquiat inspiring it because well I saw a lot of Basquiat-ess influence in the work I was coming across.

Finally, I reflected a bit and I was inspired to draw my stick-figure carrying a bunch of likes and hearts from Instagram and Facebook but leaving his heart in the back as he “gained the whole world…”.

See the art below, but before that, my take as a creative is that it’s tough to sell art as it is for US $ and now having to convince my audience (even if my audience was only my mom who would support me in everything I do) was going to make it much harder. First they would take their US $ and have to buy some crypto to add to their wallet that they have to setup and never lose the key to and do all of that to buy a JPEG.

I think the NFT (Non Fungible Token) is great for artists but not for their audience if it requires them to be thrown into the crypto world. It adds to much friction but then again… I don’t know much about it so don’t listen to me on this.

This not ART advice.