The Weekly Take
Last winter, Russian ballerina Natalia Osipova auctioned three performances of her dancing as NFTs for a combined £59,424 (79,628 USD) at Bonhams. An edition of Mitchell F. Chan’s conceptual art piece Digital Zone Of Immaterial Pictorial Sensibility sold for over 1.5 million USD at Sotheby’s in October. Public space artist Eltono sold 16 squares to be painted on an art gallery wall. While it is still true that digital art and photography have seen the greatest successes so far with NFTs, increasingly the technology is being taken up by less traditionally collectible forms of art.
In principle, artists could always have sold this sort of intangible art to collectors. And in some cases they have. Yves Klein sold receipts to an empty space in his famous showing of The Void as early as 1958. Conceptual art has been slowly growing interest from collectors for years now. And, in theory, instead of an NFT Natalia Osipova could have used a signed receipt or certificate to signify that her particular performances had been collected and owned. However, physical receipts come with their own risks. They can be forged. It can be difficult to track how many editions have been produced and sold. And maybe most importantly, it is difficult to show off a physical receipt to wide audiences.
NFT technology can provide solutions for each of these concerns. An artist can easily prove that they control the originating address. A collector can easily determine the number of editions produced by monitoring an artist’s minting activity. And the general public can easily verify if a collector actually owns a piece. Together, these solutions provide the trust in the provenance of a work needed for a secondary market in non-traditionally collectible art to develop.
Chart of the Week
Trading volume on OpenSea nearly hit 5 billion USD in January smashing the previous high from last August. Anime-themed profile pictures seem to be driving the surge, with the Azuki project seeing 219 million USD in secondary sales in January alone.
News
Nike has taken prominent online reseller StockX to court claiming trademark infringement for their use of images of Nike shoes on their NFTs. The StockX NFTs act as claims on physical shoes stored in their “climate-controlled, high-security vaults” allowing owners to trade the NFTs instead of actual shoes, cutting shipping and other transaction costs. Nike worries, however, that NFTs with images of their shoes may confuse its customers as it prepares to enter the NFT space itself.
GameStop appears to be the latest company to announce their entry into web3. The company has entered into a partnership with layer-2 solution Immutable X to develop a 100 million USD fund that invests in creators. GameStop also announced it will launch an NFT marketplace later this year. With Coinbase, Facebook, the Associated Press, Shopify, and a number of others all recently announcing NFT marketplaces, the race to enter the next phase of e-commerce is just beginning.
Coachella is selling lifetime passes to its festivals as NFTs. Using NFTs as access passes to events is becoming more common with a number of projects giving holders access to yearly conferences and private chat rooms. Even the NFL is now experimenting with commemorative NFT tickets for select games.
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The author has no investment position in any of the companies or NFT projects mentioned, and has no business relationship with any company or project that is mentioned in this article.