It's been a head-scratching few weeks for both business and the arts. While the revolution is underway, we are also in chaos.

NFTs are not cutting-edge digital art

Some say non-fungible tokens (NFTs) are digital works of art owned exclusively by the buyer, dating back to Colored Coins in 2012, or CryptoPunks in 2017, and the space exploded the other day too. But digital art (DA) itself has an older lineage. As early as 1857, the Frenchman Jules Antoine Lissajous (1822-1880) used a camera to capture the lines produced by sound, thereby publishing the mathematically designed "Lissajous Figures" image. These figures were determined by the American Nathaniel Bowditch (1773-1838) 42 years earlier, but Bowditch did not render them as a picture.

The first pieces of art are thought to be computer-made, since "digitization" was invented in 1950 by C Dynamics numerical scientist Ben Laposky (1914-2000). He called these compositions "Oscillons" or "Electrical Compositions". They are complex types of "Lissajous" images. In 1953 he called it "Electronic Abstraction" in an exhibition of his work in Cherokee, Iowa.

Inspiring other digital artists, Laposky produced the medium's first major exhibition in Stuttgart in 1965, starring Frieder Nake (b. 1938), and three years later in London The Institute of Contemporary Art presents its first museum exhibition entitled "Cybernetic Contingency".

Digital Arts (DA)'s emphasis on geometric abstraction, saddled with the world's excitement about Pollock and the deluge of Abstract Expressionism, muddied the cultural waters of the time. The optical playfulness and clean rendering of Digital Art (DA) designs also powered Op Art in the early 1960s.

The clear linearity, geometric shapes, and numerical assortment that characterize digital art (DA) continue to this day. Major digital art collections are currently housed at the Whitney, MoMA, Walker Art Center, and other giants of the art world; from MuDa in Zurich, to the Morisato Museum of Digital Art in Tokyo, to the Digital Arts Center in Los Angeles, There are already a dozen museums dedicated to digital art collections.

NFT images: convenient for viewing, but not suitable for museum use

Beeple (Mike Winkelmann at beeple-crap.com – the guy who made the $69 million Everydays) says we’re witnessing “the next chapter in art history.”

New chapters in art history will see new art being produced by artists. But this is a chapter written by artists (and their advocates) who propose novel financial initiatives.

This is a new chapter in financial history.

Indeed, Damien Hirst and others see financial behavior as aesthetic behavior. Artists have sold air, poop, and invisibility as conceptual advances, but that's not what's happening this month. When this art is sold attached to NFTs and crypto, it is not presented as an art performance. Because even though they are taking advantage of new market liquidity, there is no new aesthetic concept affecting this action.

At the time of writing, the vast majority of images in Ethereum’s collection of NFTs are more like 1950s paperback covers than years of digital art that has migrated to museums.

While these NFTs are primarily inspired by anime, computer games, and manga, this NFT is sure to persist in the realm of cultural references for decades, and I will admit that there is an art historical development here, but I don't think it's It's what Beeple thought.

It's been a long and bloody D-Day since Andy Warhol's first art show in 1962, before much of kitsch and high art has been fragmented and reassembled. We can count Toulouse Lautrec (1864 -1901), Stuart Davies (1892 -1964) and Andy (1928 -1987) as the first to bear the brunt, but the men who made the bombs in today's broken land Definitely Brian Donnelly (b. 1974), best known for his comic book character KAWS.

True, this could be an eruption of bad taste (as people say about the emergence of KAW and Warhol), but I don't think that's the case. Because they're used to Neuromancer (styled images) and are buying what they like.

It's not an art revolution, it's just some exciting new projects.

Having said that, I believe that the cultural balance of artists will adapt to the NFT market in no time. At the rate things are going at the moment, we're going to start chasing higher art goods, even though it's now chasing CryptoKitties, video clips, and raw tweets.

Author: Eric Shaw