Right-Click, Save Beeple | Community is Culture; Community is Currency; Community is King
NFTs and the Forging of Future Societies in the Guise of Art — Part III
From CryptoPunks, Beeple’s record breaking NFT to BoredApeYatchClub and the dramatic merging of the Punks and Apes under the stewardship of Yuga Labs in 2022, this essay is a 5 part series exploring how NFTs are not merely a value creating tool, but a vehicle for building future societies in the guise of art.
Part I: Origins of Crypto Culture — Transition into The Age of Value
Part II: CryptoPunks — Why NFTs Are Not the Same as JPEGs
Part III: I explore the story surrounding digital artist, Mike Winkelmann, aka Beeple and his $69 Million NFT sale to make sense of the exorbitant price tag to show how value in the digital age has shifted from art as an object towards the ecosystem and community surrounding the artwork.
III
Community is Culture; Community is Currency; Community is King
If digital art can be understood as “digital-born, computable art that is created, stored, and distributed via digital technologies and uses the features of these technologies as a medium” [1], then it seems NFTs are poised to distort our understanding altogether as it alters the architecture of the medium itself. As more people begin experimenting with its programable functionality, the more intertwined and complex the ideas are becoming and the more we are realizing what NFTs can do. As we saw in Part II, it isn’t another hardware or software upgrade like in the past; in fact it has nothing to do with aesthetics, speed or performance. It comes down to digital value — how it is generated and inter-connected, where it is placed and what it empowers in the emerging digital landscape.
From the creation of the first ever NFT in 2014 to the sale of Beeple’s NFT for $69 Million in 2021, it has already generated the most expensive piece of a digital artwork ever sold. To put it in perspective, NFTs have only existed for 7 years and the medium of digital art has existed for over 60. If nothing else, what is clear is that NFTs have distorted the traditional relationship between art and value, which in the pre blockchain era mirrored that of the larger art market.
There has always been a fundamental layer of trust placed on the artist to control supply and provide proof of ownership, which together create scarcity and add value to the artwork. This element of trust is only accentuated in digital art, which in reality could be copied and sold infinitely if desired. In essence, prior to blockchain technology, what you owned when buying a digital work of art was not necessarily the file, but a certificate of authenticity that points to the legitimacy of your file versus all its copies. The artwork is independent of ownership and as we can imagine, if one can get hold of the file, it’s much easier to forge a certificate of authenticity to prove ownership than forging the art itself.
What NFTs do is transfer trust away from the artist (certificate of authenticity) onto a digital public ledger (blockchain) whose record is immutable and whose trail can be openly traced by anyone. In this new digital environment being shaped as we speak, only those files that are recorded would appear real and the rest would cease to exist, thereby creating digital scarcity. In this sense, the uploaded (minted) file along with the creator of the work and the associated owner, which gets updated every time the artwork changes hands, and are now generated together for the world to see. From here on out its authenticity, supply and ownership are “set in stone”, so to speak, or should I say “set on chain”.
Just like one studies the chemical make up of paint and canvas to determine the age and authenticity of an old painting, a new and more efficient digital system to trace the provenance of art is now established. For this reason alone I suspect that every piece of art sold in the future, should and probably will be recorded on the blockchain as a NFT, irrespective of its medium. For digital art in particular, this ability to make a file truly unique and traceable is undoubtedly a huge leap forward, but is it enough of a reason to generate a $69 Million valuation for a single art object? Yes, there is a healthy dose of speculation enabled by the newly formed foundations of economics and trust, but there is also something bigger at play that is accelerating value in the new digital world.
To give some background, Beeple’s NFT titled ‘Everydays: The First 5000 Days’, was originally purchased in March 2021 at a Christies auction by two technologists who go by their pseudonyms, Metakovan and Twobadour, who collaborated with Beeple to bundle 5000 digital paintings into a single NFT specially designed for this sale. In December 2020, a few months before making the record breaking purchase, they acquired another series of twenty first edition pieces of Beeple artworks for $2.2 million. All of these works were bought through their crypto investment fund, the ‘Metapurse Fund’, which was set up to invest in digital assets — from art, unique collectibles to virtual real-estate. In their own words, “Metapurse’s mission is to democratize access and ownership to highly sought-after artwork and accelerate the cultural Renaissance that is happening within the metaverse.” [2]
With this vision in mind, in Jan 2021 they used Beeple’s twenty 1/1 works acquired in 2020 along with other NFTs and digital assets, and bundled them together (not including the $69 Million artwork) into the B.20 project. The goal — to launch a B20 crypto token to fractionalize ownership of artwork that would traditionally be beyond the grasp of the average person to own. As part of the project, they built virtual museums across multiple Metaverses in CryptoVoxels, Decentraland, and Somnium Space where all the art within the B.20 bundle are displayed and can be accessed by holders of the B20 token. In addition, these plots of land and the museum themselves are packaged into the B.20 bundle, so by buying B20 tokens, you not only are a part owner of art worth millions of dollars but also part owner of the museum itself.
“Imagine being able to not only own some of the art in the MoMA, but also a piece of the MoMA museum itself and the land it sits on. Visitors and viewers would become shareholders. This novel type of art experience infused with art ownership is exactly what we did with the B20 token.”
So what does all of this have to do with the $69 Million valuation of a work that’s not even included in this project? Well, once they launched their B.20 project, they needed a catalyst that would take it mainstream and Beeple’s Everydays was just that. One caveat we need to acknowledge about the price before moving on is that since the work was purchased completely using Ether, it cannot be directly compared to historical fiat currency based art market valuations. Moreover the price itself was set by the buyers who were also involved in the making of the NFT further complicating this equation.
That said, if for a moment we look at the artwork in isolation consisting of a mosaic of 5000 digital paintings he created over 13 years at a value of $69,346,250, then each individual piece amounts to $13,869.25. This now seems very reasonable compared to single artworks auctioned off for millions in the past such as Andreas Gursky’s Rhine II, which was sold for $4.3 Million at a Christie’s auction in 2011. In fact, it wasn’t even the most expensive artwork sold in 2021, with that accolade still belonging to the master himself — Picasso.
Moreover, from a purely art making perspective, his internet-fuelled digital paintings comprising of classic traits such as speed, repetition, satire and meme culture, seem more like a reflection of computer technology of the past than of blockchain technology of the future.
This is not to devalue Beeple’s work in anyway; the mere fact that he was able to consistently produce images every single day for such a long period is by itself remarkable — it is to show that the price tag in relation to the art object still doesn’t seem to add up. For this reason it could be easy to see NFTs as pure hype, but those who are fast to judge the book by its cover are missing the crypto-component of the artwork. To continue with the metaphor, value isn’t just in the cover image or the content of the book, but also in the community surrounding it.
If JPEGs are synonymous with infinite replication, then the equivalently significant feature of NFTs are community.
In this new environment, community is culture; community is currency; and community is king. This premise can be applied all across the crypto space from buying meme tokens, trading NFTs to investing in companies, where the strongest communities tend to outperform others through the power of network effects. This is the same force that powers some of the largest companies today like Amazon, Alibaba, Uber, Snapchat, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc whose value largely derives from the network of users, without which its content and platform (cover image) would be meaningless.
Being technologists, Metakovan and Twobadour clearly understood this and what better way to propel their B20 community by investing in an artist who already had a 2 Million strong and engaged social audience for them to harness. They strategically chose to invest in Beeple’s work, not merely because of its visual quality but because his community, arguably a mirror image of his counter-cultural ideology, matched their own beliefs and vision of the future they were trying to build through their B.20 project. Unlike in the past, where the power of communities surrounding the artist was limited to influencing narratives and perception, by investing in the B20 token they can now participate in a real economic sense and not only derive value from it, but drive it.
Why Beeple? Why plan for weeks and endure nerve-wracking bidding? Why spend over $2.2 million?…First, we feel strongly that Beeple’s entry into the crypto art world is an accelerant for the entire NFT ecosystem. It isn’t just the numbers alone, though they are massive: consider Beeple’s 1.7 million Instagram followers…”
This is perhaps what they were hoping for and from this perspective, their eye-catching bid can be explained as a $69 million marketing campaign, no different from Spotify’s $310 Million sponsorship deal with FC Barcelona, to spread awareness, create hype and increase the perceived value of their B.20 project and token. It is not an attack on their approach, but this ability to creatively garner attention to build community is a core part of the crypto playbook, and in that they succeeded beyond belief. This work alone has done more in shaping the perception of NFTs than anything else so far. However, it isn’t the price and content, but the larger change in dynamics between digital art, culture, and value that it reveals, which we need to be focused on. In a nutshell, blockchain has opened the doors for art to enter the world of speculation and finance by allowing people to capitalize on popular culture of our times.
Would the artwork have generated the same price tag if it was still a JPEG or if Beeple dint have a strong community? Art being subjective, one can never be completely certain, but what is for sure is that the value of the NFT in this instance cannot be disconnected from the role of their B20 token in determining the price. If the Web 2.0 way of valuing digital art is to asses it purely on its visual, historical and monetary merit, the Web 3.0 way is to place value on its utility.
A simple change in digital character form a JPEG to a NFT allowed the artwork to enter a completely new ecosystem that expands what can be done with the same piece of art. The novel experiment of fractional ownership is not an aesthetic exploration, as you would imagine when looking at art in a traditional sense, but a pursuit of adding functional value for the benefit of society. Beeple’s work became the vehicle to fast track Metakovan and Twobadour’s vision to not only democratise and redefine the experience of owning art, but spread their belief that blockchain is built to empower the masses and disrupt the echo chamber of power.
In a broader sense, since NFTs are nothing but blank programmable slates (as we saw in part II), this concept can be applied to any scarce asset in the real world such as a historical painting or real estate, meaning that owning a Picasso or a property in Beverly Hills, which would be nearly unthinkable for most of us is now made possible through NFTs. Anyone can now be a part owner of the asset and be able to partake in the upside of its sale. Spreading this vision of the future to them was worth a $69 million investment, and for those who bought into the B20 token, you would imagine, also share similar beliefs.
By supporting art, they are also supporting an ideology — not just as an investment, a status symbol or an intellectual exercise, but as a tool that generates value and therefore monetary power to materialize their collective world view.
Their scope is currently limited to the digital realm, but if in the future their community grows strong enough and wills it, they could expand their reach into the real world, perhaps even challenging existing institutions and frameworks. For now, their project may not be going as planned, but irrespective of how this story unfolds, what is clear is if NFTs were a book, we are still writing its preface. If CryptoPunks demonstrated that value can be created out of a digital image, then Beeple’s ‘Everydays’ shows how value has now shifted from the object towards the community surrounding the artwork. The first real chapter will be about how these communities are activated, to what end and who controls them.
Finally we arrive at the crux of this essay. Now that we have established the value of communities in the world of NFTs, in part IV I bring us back to the present. It’s 2022 and the Punks and Apes, two of the largest NFT collections, have merged under the stewardship of a single entity — Yuga Labs. I expand our scope by looking into Bored Ape Yacht Club and the ecosystem they are building to explore how NFTs have the potential to reshape the fabric of digital societies throwing art and creativity right into the heart of the digital revolution.
Read On:
Right-Click, Save The Bored Apes | NFTs and the Forging of Future Societies in the Guise of Art — Part IV
Harsha Biswajit is a new media visual artist currently living and working in Berlin. With a background in economics and digital fine art, his work primarily explores the changing nature of reality brought about by technological advancements in our society. This theme has run throughout his career and most recently manifested itself in experimenting with and writing about NFTs and Blockchain in general to understand how this new technology is going to shape our future. His works have been exhibited in USA, India, France, Spain and Hong Kong, amongst others.
