Five artists who will make you rethink what’s possible with crypto
In this post, we'll explore how five artists have used their creativity and technical skills to design one-of-a-kind crypto pieces that push the limits of what's possible with blockchain technology.
Beeple
We have to start this off by introducing Mike Winkelmann, also known as Beeple. If you’ve been around the crypto art and NFT world at least tangentially in the past couple of months, you cannot have missed the news about Beeple. Just recently, at the beginning of 2021, Beeple sold an NFT representing a collection of his artworks for the impressive amount of 69 million dollars.
“Everydays: The First 5000 Days” is a collection of 5000 miniatures of the daily artwork Beeple has created for the past close to 14 years. The collage features images of political figures, depictions of globally influential events, and anything that inspired Beeple. What is revolutionary about this sale is that it was facilitated by one of the best-recognized auction houses worldwide - Christie’s.
While NFTs remain somewhat at the sidelines of global art trade, Beeple managed to garner significant interest from the mainstream by pursuing a sale of his “Everydays: The First 5000 Days” through an auction house. Side note - this is one of the most expensive NFTs sold by far.
Ai Weiwei
Born in 1957, in Beijing, China, Ai Weiwei is one of the loudest voices critiquing the Chinese government and its oppressive regime. Much of his work is influenced by this rebellion against oppression and limitations set on creative expression and free speech.
In 2018, Ai Weiwei launched his daring art project - an Ethereum-based collaboration with Irish artist Kevin Abosch. By creating two freely distributable Ethereum tokens, the artistic duo wanted to push people to question their understanding of what value is, especially in the context of human life. Alarmed by the raging global refugee crisis, Abosch and Weiwei explored blockchain technology and its revolutionary power.
“It’s not about a potential for creating art, but, rather, to question the existing system and the potential to create a new system outside of the established one,” Ai shared in an interview for Motherboard.
Named PRICELESS, the project consisted of one forever unavailable ERC-20 PRCLS token and a second PRCLS token which is identical, however, publicly available and divisible to a maximum of one quintillionth at a time.
By illustrating the huge contrast between what is publicly available and what is forever locked away, the two creators aimed to raise questions about people’s perception of value. And what better way to do that than through a blockchain-based art project?
José Delbo
José Delbo’s history is incredibly rich and fascinating. He is an 87-year-old Argentinian comic artist who has worked for some of the industry’s biggest names throughout his career, like DC Comics, Marvel Comics, and Valiant Comics. Delbo has worked on projects like Green Lantern, The Transformers, and Wonder Woman.
As the Covid-19 pandemic hit, José Delbo found himself stuck at home, missing his engagements at comic book events and conventions. Because of his immense love for the comics community, Delbo started seeking a new group of fans and creatives to interact with. And he found the NFT community. In an interview for Decrypt, he said:
“After I saw how amazing the community is and how appreciative they were of my work, I knew I had to create more art for this space.”
José Delbo is living proof that the NFT world and community are ever-evolving and accommodating. While he was a traditional comic creator for decades, the rise of NFT art was a saving grace for him during the pandemic. The crypto world has no age limit, and it’s not just for the hipsters and techies out there - the space for collaboration with the NFT community is limitless. José Delbo shows artists that their previous creative efforts can easily be transferred to become NFT pieces. Think about it, thanks to him, we now have tokenized Batman, Superman and Wonder Woman comics, which we originally read on paper when we were kids.
Hashmasks
Hashmasks is a collaborative project with more than 70 artists coming together to produce a collection of over 16,000 unique artworks. An interesting fact about the Hashmasks project is that some collectors managed to uncover hidden messages tucked away in some of the NFTs they purchased.
The presumption behind the Hashmasks project is that no two pieces of art included in the collection are the same, except one pair. As it turns out, the occurrence of a twin piece for ‘The Masked’ was not intentional but resulted from a human error. Because of that, the image representing piece 3550 was duplicated and placed over the image representing artwork 9934. What led to the twins’ discovery was a tiny inscription of a message in Sanskrit on the side of the original mask.
Twitter user “trent e” found the inscription and decided to check over the hashes of the two twin pieces, which were not identical. Because of a simple copy/paste mistake in uploading the images, the two NFTs have greatly increased in value, as they unintentionally disrupted the purpose of Hasmasks. This case also stands to prove how much the NFT community loves quirky art stories.
PBoy
Pascal Boyart, or PBoy, is an innovative crypto and street artist looking to seamlessly integrate blockchain technology into his art. PBoy’s revolutionary approach allowed him to secure funding through patronage by selling parts of his works as NFTs to true fans and collectors.
In 2019, PBoy shook the art scene by announcing that he has hidden access to a digital prize worth 1000 dollars in Bitcoin in one of his street artworks. This was a revolutionary take on the way cryptocurrencies could be part of the art world. The added bonus for PBoy was that people started rushing around Paris, touring his street art and looking for the hidden prize, which was an incredibly successful move.
Since then, PBoy has heavily invested himself in NFT art, and his latest work was completed during the Covid-19 lockdowns in 2020. He started working on a mural titled “The Underground Sistine Chapel.” What was groundbreaking about this project is that PBoy relied exclusively on patrons’ support - people who decided to support his creative process. PBoy’s patronage scheme allowed collectors to bid for different tiers of involvement with the creative process, which in return guaranteed them a set of rewards, including exclusive NFTs representing parts of the mural.
PBoy has completely redefined what art patronage can be. Considering the close alignment of his ideas with Minty.Art’s values and vision for what art trade can be, we praise PBoy as one of the inspirations behind our platform’s creation. Patronage is the future of art, and PBoy has proven this more than once.
If you want to find out more about Minty.Art and patronage, sign up here.