Cape Town’s Worldart has become the first SA gallery to go to market with a non-fungible token (NFT) artwork. The piece, which depicts a masked, superhero-styled woman titled Timekeeper 151, was created by Cape Town artist Norman O’Flynn.
It forms part of the Timekeeper series: portraits painted since 2015 in a vivid pop style in which images and slogans have less to do with the subject in the portrait than with the world they live in.
O’Flynn’s NFT is a GIF conversion of the physical painting. The winning bidder will receive the painting as an extra reward and may keep it should the digital work get back onto the market later. Bidding started on Wednesday at $5,000 (about R73,000) on sales platform OpenSea and closes on April 16 at 10pm.
This is a new era for NFT art, which was catapulted into the mainstream when a work by US digital artist Beeple achieved $69.3m (about R1bn) at Christie’s. Sotheby’s wants a slice of the pie too and is looking at partnering with digital artist Pak.
Nonfungible.com tracks this market and recorded $250m (about R3,6bn) worth of sales for 2020. To put this in perspective, the size of the African art auction market was last estimated at $42,3m (about R614,5m).
Most NFTs are part of the Ethereum blockchain. They provide digital artists with a mechanism to package their art so they can trade it — tokenise it — and digitally authenticate it. The information is stored online and protected with blockchain coding.
There are many advantages for artists. It removes intermediaries and gives them direct access to market, plus they can enable a feature that ensures they get up to a 10% cut when works are resold. Artists can also decide to drop an artwork as one-of-a-kind or an edition of many.
While digital art can be easily copied, NFTs cannot be forged. This is carving a way forward for this art market. It moves the focus to ownership, as collectors can own an entry in the blockchain itself. Ownership becomes central to the medium, yet owners only get personal use rights and can mostly share their art on a social media page, in a digital marketplace, virtual museum or game world.
Recent price records are likely to raise alarm bells regarding conservation. What happens should the quality of the image deteriorate or the technology that conveys it become obsolete?
Buyers of NFTs are rewarded with bragging rights, however. In the marketplace, which includes key players OpenSea, Rarible and Nifty Gateway, the name of an artwork’s owner is displayed next to that of the artist. That said, artists and collectors use pseudonyms, much like in the gaming world or the early days of the internet, somehow perpetuating, maybe involuntarily, the art world’s notorious opacity.
