Welcome to this week’s Minty round-up covering some of the most significant events in Crypto Art and NFTs. Stick around to see our pick for Artist of the Week.
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Record-Breaking NFT Sale
This week saw GalaGames @GoGalaGames and PolyientGames @PolyientGames break an incredible record for the biggest sale in NFT history. ‘Citadel of the Sun’ sold for an astonishing $800,000, breaking the previous record set by Beeple @beeple at $777,777.
The duo is developing an MMORPG (Mass Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game) Fantasy Game titled ‘Mirandus’ using the Gala blockchain. The technology promotes users to buy land within the game for real money through ‘Land Deeds’, some selling for over a million USD.
“Our mission is to enable freedom for anyone on this planet through play.”
Combining user ownership, benefits of the blockchain, and engaging gameplay of MMORPGs has set Mirandus on a path for success. See more about the game at gala.games
NFT Art Sales Reach All-Time High
In December 2020, the total trading volume of Non-Fungible Token (NFT) artwork hit an all-time high of $8.2 million, compared to the $2.6 million in November.
Many new artists and collectors are starting to realize the potential of blockchain technology, especially utilizing cryptocurrencies for the transactions. Richard Chen, the creator of CryptoArt.io stated that 'crypto natives are starting to understand the value NFTs bring to verifying the authenticity of the original artwork'.
2020 has been a difficult year for many people, with many art galleries closing and museums shutting their doors, many artists are now displaying their works within virtual galleries. With the rising popularity of Crypto Art, the goto currency Ethereum (ETH) has seen tremendous gains over the last month (+74.12%).
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A.I Generated Artwork
Early this morning, top artist Robbie Barrat @videodrome sold his latest piece ‘AI-Generated Nude Portrait #1’ for an astonishing $109,863. The previous owner of the NFT, CuriousNFTs @curiousnfts congratulated the new owner ‘Blombos’ by posting a short GIF of the infamous meme of Leonardo di Caprio in the Great Gatsby film.
Robbie Barrat @videodrome is an artist and graphic designer working with artificial intelligence as a tool and a medium. The artist took to Instagram to write about the piece, “A kind of Francis Bacon / Sol Lewitt mashup that investigates the latent space of flesh as expressed through a global history of representation". Robbie made a 10 ETH royalty on the new sale (worth almost $11,000) after selling the work for $176 around 3 years ago.
The first AI-generated piece titled ‘Portrait of Edmond Belamy’ sold for $432,500 back in 2018, it’s exciting to see how the genre of art has integrated itself into the world of Crypto Art as well as where it will go next.
Crypto Puzzles
Top artist of our Pak @muratpak has been releasing cryptic messages on his Twitter account teasing his latest NFT for the last few days. Titled ‘The Gift’, these pieces feature hidden messages of which the community must race against each other to solve. The first person to solve the puzzle will claim the NFT prize! The first piece in the series was claimed by Gavin Shaprio @shapiro500 after figuring out the sequence of flashing lights formed together to create a QR code.
With Pak teasing yet more additions to ‘The Gift’ series, these mysterious Tweets have caught the attention of none other than Sotheby’s @sothebys (the world’s largest, most trusted marketplace for art).
Artist of the Week
This week we have an exclusive interview with the artist Skygolpe @skygolpe. Skygolpe is an Italian artist featured previously at the Contemporary Digital Art Fair in 2020. Creating unique artwork, he is recognized for his use of faceless silhouettes. He doesn’t “see” but “tries to feel'' and when he is a painting he works “in a sort of meditation”, a state that he tries to achieve through all of his work.
You had your first Virtual reality solo show in September how did that go?
The VR show was a great experience, I’ve never used VR before in my life so it has been an interesting challenge. After buying the Oculus Quest I did about two weeks of training in the Metaverse. When this occasion manifested I really felt that this was the perfect way to explore the connection between my art and the digital realm. I think that this event has represented something special, probably it has been one of the first attempts to combine art, curation and architecture in the metaverse. I really would like to thank the Moca’s team for making this possible.
Do you think that you'll be exploring VR again in the future?
100%, probably in 2021. Next time I would like to make something even more ambitious and, yeah, bring more artists in, definitely, definitely it’s in the plan!
I look forward to that. So how did you first come into contact with NFT marketplaces?
That was completely random. I have been studying cryptocurrencies for the past two years, because I've always been attracted to alternative ways to live reality. And so I began to study; Why is Bitcoin existing? What is the purpose? And so this brought me to Ethereum and then into Cent, which is a social media built on blockchain. And that’s where I discovered Cryptoart for the first time. I immediately felt like I wanted to experimenting in finding a way to bring my physical work to the digital dimension. I call this process “organic digitalization”. It is digital but somehow you preserve the idea of staring into a painting. So the digital is not so evident and excessive to actually completely change this physical state into digital, but it becomes a kind of a hybrid state.
It seems you have quite a philosophical approach to your art, is this fair to say?
I would say that 80% of my inspiration comes from philosophy and from my mind, meaning from the logical consequence of thoughts that are in my mind. And so identity and existentialism really plays a major part of my study and influences., I am working a lot on myself, probably my work is an attempt to challenge my convictions. I write aphorisms too, they often lead me to the ideas for my paintings. If I had to choose one word to define my work I would choose “evocative”. This is my favourite word “evocative” and “intense”. These two. So it's not about beauty, it's just about these two things.
Do you think that it's more difficult to express yourself or be heard in this sea of social media that we have today?
Oh, no I don't think so. I don't believe so much in demonising new technologies. I just see it as an ultra conservative way of thinking. I mean evolution has always been here. So I never have this approach. I'm always like, okay, this thing has happened. So it means that in a way this is what was supposed to happen. So now, how can we understand it? How can we find the positives? How can we use it in the correct way? How can we educate people to use it in the correct way? Instead of saying, “No, this thing is destroying our society because people cannot speak to each other anymore.“ This is just when you are afraid of the future. So can technology be used in a bad way? One hundred percent! But that doesn't only apply to technology.
I noticed that you said you were an uneducated artist on your Instagram. Can you elaborate on that a bit please, Is that something that you're quite proud to tell people?
Yes because one of the things that I kind of feel proud of is the originality of my work, but this originality, I think it comes more from the way I approach concepts. I'm not saying that studying is wrong, what I'm saying is that especially nowadays, individual education can be even more effective if the state of mind is really focused on obtaining something. But the problem is that most of the people, they just basically, they don't know what they want. And this leads them to kind of being dragged around by someone else’s standards and ideals. So I think from what I could see in my life, I'm 34 years old, but very often, genuine unity and originality comes from a real passion for something, and there are very few things that cannot be learned on your own. But learning on your own can also mean to go and look for the person that you specifically want: I want this person to teach me this. So it has nothing to do with whether you study or research or not, just try to pick your influences in the direction you want.
If you are an artist and you want to share your passion and your thoughts about emerging crypto art, please reach out to us on Twitter @minty_nft
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