These Bay Area crypto artists say the NFT craze is more than just hype

There was plenty of hand-wringing to go around. Is there real value in NFTs or was all this merely the result of a market bubble? Do NFTs represent anexistential ecological threat? Was the piece itself any good?

Depends on who you ask — everybody seems to have an opinion about this young market.

Away from all the internet-breaking headlines, though, Bay Area artists and designers — many of whom had been working in the digital token space for months or years before “NFT” became a little-understood household phrase — seemed unbothered by the latest media hype cycle (even if it is driving up thecost of minting NFTs）.相反,他们关注的是他们看到的new futures in the form, both financially and artistically. As one San Francisco artist, Göksu Ilgaz Koçakcıgil (aka @skywaterr), put it, “When I realized I could make money with my own digital art, I was entirely mindblown. I was like my life is about to change.”

Corbin Bell, or@PixelActivist, moved to San Francisco two years ago. For a long time, he felt out of place, unable to find a single design job. “I literally never got an interview in two years,” he said. He wound up driving for Postmates and Caviar to make rent. Then, last summer, he started hearing about the NFT technology. He decided to try minting his own work.

It took months of trial and error, but on Feb. 6, he finally made his first sale. The piece,“Enter the Chain,”a looping video of a spiral parking lot with an M.C. Escher-like feel, went for .385 Ether, the currency backed by the Ethereum blockchain — something like $640 at the time. It was the first time he’d ever sold a piece of his art. Since then, he’s sold three other pieces. Two of which went for one Ether each — about $1,500 a pop.

“It’s a way to do what you really love. There’s no compromising,” Bell says. In a short time, NFTs have become a path toward financial stability for him and other artists he knows. “It’s just opened up a way for the misfits, as corny as that sounds.”

When Bell talks about a new way for the misfits, he’s not just talking money. There’s also a sense that this new technology can support communities.Danny Jones, a self-taught San Francisco graphic designer who also goes by Yasly,sold his first NFT, “Super Wild,”on Feb. 18, a day after listing it, for 1.99 Ether (or about $3,900 at the time). The piece is a soothing, looped video of flowers frozen in a translucent rainbow block that is forever rotating.

Jones took that and other money he’s made from NFT sales and reinvested it in other artists. “I just bought an NFT from my friend ... I won (their) auction and got to tangibly support her. Money is definitely not the only motivator in any of this for me.”

Non-fungible tokens are not new, strictly speaking; they’ve been around, in one form or another, for about six years.

他们是同样的区块链技术的支持nology that supports various cryptocurrencies. In this case, Ethereum is the currency of choice. But unlike individual Ether, which are interchangeable with one another, NFTs are one-of-a-kind. Essentially, artists can go to an exchange, “mint” their artwork as an NFT, and auction it off. (Sometimes they’ll also include a physical copy with the sale.) Right now, most NFTs lean toward visual art, but it’s just as possible to mint certificates for digital trading cards, music albums, video games, even experiences. Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey signed and then soldthe first tweet he evertweeted.

After steadily rising in popularity last year —Beeple’s first sale, for $6,666.66, occurred in October — the technology crossed over into the mainstream last month. That’s when celebrity culture got into the act. The musicianGrimes sold $6 millionworth of NFTs. Theclassic Nyan Cat meme— a cat with a poptart body, propelled through space by rainbow exhaust — sold for just under $600,000.

Both Bell and Jones listed their pieces onFoundation, an invite-only NFT listing sitepopular with Bay Area artists. Kayvon Tehranian, the site’s CEO, says Foundation launched with 50 artists in February, after doing a year of closed experimentation with NFTs, and now they list thousands of artists. “I could give you a number and that number will be massively outdated tomorrow.”

The current boom in attention, Tehranian says, is no doubt part of the usual internet hype cycle, but that doesn’t mean NFTs are a some short-lived trend. “You have artists that are completely reorienting their practices around this technology.” He describes NFTs as a “new layer” to the internet, one that has the potential to fundamentally change the way things operate. “People have trouble seeing that because ... exponential growth is very hard to understand.”

Barry Threw, executive director ofGray Area, the Mission District art and technology space, spoke about the blockchain’s transformational potential in similar terms. “We’re in the CompuServe age of this stuff. Like, we haven’t even gone to AOL or MySpace or, you know, even Facebook yet in terms of lineages, of how technologies develop.”

At the moment, though, Threw describes it in simple terms: “It’s an asset bubble, it’s a hype bubble and it provides some opportunity for artists to have some traction. ... (But) it’s a market that’s just as interested in buying memes as it is in buying art.”

Legacy art institutions are keeping their eyes on the form, too. Representatives for both YBCA and the Fine Art Museums said they have no plans to start collecting NFTs, but they’re watching how artists use the space.

Three years ago, while Koçakcıgil was working her way through a degree in visual communication design at San Francisco State, she looked around and “saw all of this amazing digital work that nobody was paying for” and imagined, one day, opening up a digital art gallery, a real physical place with artwork on display.

Up until recently, that felt more like a dream. She had files full of digital art work she “didn’t think anybody cared” about. Then, in November, she started joining crypto art communities and found out about NFTs, a paradigm-shifting discovery.

In January, she did her first drop of NFT-backed work, and earlier this month, she unveiled a new collection on Foundation she calls “BLÖBS.” To create each piece, she uses a mix of physical and digital techniques and collaborates with an artificial intelligence. “团第一” is a pulsating pink abstraction that moves in an endless loop against a black screen.

It sold on March 6 for 0.169 Ether — or about $310.