NFTs Are Blowing up the Art World

Lately, NFTs are linked to almost all types of creative works including music albums, tweets, photographs, paintings, and collectibles like baseball cards. Everyone from Grimes to Kings of Leon to even the NBA is making use of this technology.

Think of the Mona Lisa which is an original piece of art. Obviously, it can’t be swapped for a Mona Lisa poster in the Louvre gift shop because the poster doesn’t hold the same value as the original painting.

So when an NFT for any creative work is sold to a buyer, the tokens get added to the buyer’s digital wallet but the ownership of the artwork itself becomes trickier.

It is important to understand the difference between owning an NFT versus owning rights to the creative work associated with an NFT.

Hence, as this is an evolving industry, the buyer should understand the digital contract and copyright ownership when they purchase an NFT.

It is also possible that NFTs might get associated with counterfeit or be reproducible without permission of the actual creative owner. In that case, we might need to depend upon traditional methods of authentication of artwork. Several NFT websites like OpenSea are struggling with the unauthorized reproduction of art pieces.

Ben Lewis is an art historian and author of the book The Last Leonardo: The Secret Lives of the World’s Most Expensive Painting. Just like the original, he is hoping to auction the NFT at $450 million.

Okay. But hear me out! Lewis’s intentions are not to make any money but to draw attention to the secret mechanisms that auction houses use to make millions of money.

According to Lewis’ research, the Hendry family of Baton Rouge, Louisiana, sold Salvator Mundi for $1,175 in 2005, keeping mere cash of $700 after fees. Art dealers Robert Simon and Alexander Parrish purchased the piece at an estate sale that same year for $10,000. In 2013, they sold the piece for more than $75 million to a Swiss dealer Yves Bouvier, who then immediately sold it to the Russian collector Dmitry Rybolovlev for $127.5 million. Four years later, auction house Christie gave more than $400 million to Rybolovlev and acquired the painting. That’s 571,000 times what the Hendrys’ received.

“It’s just not fair,” Lewis tells Artnet News. “The dealers — Robert Simon, Alex Parish, Dmitry Rybolovlev — they all made tens of millions. It would be great if they sent a bit of money down to this family. And I thought, to bring out that point, I’d turn this into an NFT.”

The author’s digital piece titled Salvator Metaversi, looks exactly similar to the original painting except for the glass orb in Jesus’s left hand is replaced with $100 bills. This digital artwork is minted on the online NFT platform Opensea and Lewis commits to sharing half the profits with the Hendry family.

Lewis said, “What interests me is the question: Is NFT a bubble or is it froth underneath something really serious?” he says. “I don’t know. It’s fascinating.”

Source: https://medium.com/the-collector/nfts-are-blowing-up-the-art-world-4edaa6b87b89?source=rss——-8—————–cryptocurrency