Cryptography is marked by a watershed event: the Christie’s auction during which a work by Beeple was sold for 69 million dollars. From that 11 March 2021, nothing has been the same as before and the whole world has started talking about NFT: non-fungible tokens that play the role of certificate of authenticity, saved on blockchain, of the purchased digital artwork. In this way, collecting, market value and the very concept of ownership can make their entry into a sector that has always grappled with difficulty caused by reproducibility.
It is also taking advantage of the unprecedented attention paid to this world that was born at the end of 2019 Reasoned Art, an Italian startup founded by Giulio Bozzo and Andrea Marec. It is among the first international realities to present itself as a real gallery dedicated to cryptoart and NFT, which through a site (still under development) will put digital artists and collectors in contact. However, Reasoned Art will not only exist on the Net, as the event scheduled for June 10 in Milan demonstrates, when the works of artists who already collaborate with Reasoned Art today, such as Giuseppe Ragazzini, Annibale Siconolfi and the Fuse collective, will be projected on the screens of the Civic Brera kiosk and then auctioned.
“Charlie Bit My Finger”, one of the first viral videos on the web, was sold as NFT for 760 thousand dollars (and will be deleted from YouTube)
by Pier Luigi Pisa
The selection of digital artists
It is also this element that radically differentiates the Italian startup from other platforms dedicated to NFTs such as SuperRare, Rarible and OpenSea (used by Italian Tech to create the Nft given to Minister Colao): “On these portals the number of works and artists present is so large as to cause confusion and bewilderment – explained Giulio Bozzo during an event at Meet, a digital culture center in Milano – They present themselves as if they were a kind of Amazon of digital art, within which one does not understand much. On our platform, however, we aim to carefully select the most promising Italian artists ”.
A selection that will not only take place from above, but to which it will also contribute la community di Reasoned Art, who will then have a say on which other artists to invite to the online gallery. The possibility of being part of a reality where cryptoart works are valued and not lost in the chaos that often distinguishes current competitors of Reasoned Art, could exert a strong attraction on the new generations of digital artists, who also see an economic opportunity in the NFT that until a few months ago was almost entirely absent.
The Nft of the first Italian Tech homepage donated to Minister Vittorio Colao
A swing market
Overall, transactions in the cryptoart market went from a value of less than one million euros in July 2020 to a peak of 200 million last March (thanks also to Beeple), and then dropped sharply in April (about 100 million, according to the data of the specialized portal CryptoArt.io) and drop again in May: “The values have returned to the February level” – explained Andrea Marec – The feeling is that, following the great attention received in March, there has been an inevitable cooling. But from here we should go up again ”.
The drop in transactions was perhaps also caused by the big one attention to the environmental issue, which led some artists to give up creating NFT (in jargon, mintare) after discovering the enormous energy consumption required by the Ethereum blockchain, on which the vast majority of non-fungible tokens exist. Reasoned Art, which also describes itself as a company “committed to the dissemination of digital culture”, would have overcome the problem by relying on the Polygon blockchain, which replaced the classic mechanism of proof-of-work (the one also used by Bitcoins and which requires a lot of energy) with that of proof-of-stake, reducing consumption and costs by up to 99%.
at auction
Nft phenomenon: Christie’s sells a work of digital art for nearly $ 70 million
by Emanuele Capone, Bruno Ruffilli
On the other hand, sustainability is a crucial element if you want to ensure a future for this form of art: “Thanks to NFT, art and collecting are digitized, welcome new enthusiasts from different worlds, meet the new habits of millennials and generation Z – is the reflection di Bozzo – In our opinion, the future will be bright ”.
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