Strategy for Art: Technology Landscape   

Written by Tiffany Wei 

12.03.2024 

The Art Business Society’s Art + Tech talk on November 23 offered a comprehensive exploration of the digital aspects in the art world. We were honored to feature Kevin McCoy, Media Artist and Professor at NYU; Nyasha Foy, Esq., Business and Legal Affairs Executive; and Sebastian Sanchez, Manager of Digital Art Sales at Christie’s as our panelists, bringing together diverse perspectives from the realms of creation, legal affairs, and the auction house.

From Artist Studio, Legal Aspects to Auction World

As part of an artist duo with his wife Jennifer, Kevin has extensive experience creating media and technology-based works, many of which have entered prestigious museum collections. Back in 2014, he and Anil Dash co-developed the technology for putting artworks on the blockchain, and invented what is now widely-recognized as the first NFTs. “It's pretty amazing to see the idea just kind of sweep the world in certain respects,” he said, reflecting back on the platform he created, Monograph. “Our first work was Monograph Graphics. This happened at an event at the New Museum in 2014. I was there trying to bootstrap this platform—like uploading works, putting them on the chain, creating an ownership record, collecting them.” Although the website eventually shut down, Kevin noted how this foundational idea inspired what would come later. “Many people have an understanding of it, but to me, it's sitting on top of the broader rise of a token-based crypto economy. And so I think that the story of NFTs is, even though it can be traced back to 10 years ago, we're still in the very early stages of what it will be.”

At its early stages, the digital art ecosystem often requires ongoing collaboration and adaptation to find a balance between protection and accessibility. Adding on to this idea, Nyasha noted the tension between replication and originality. “There are two different types of intellectual property that could come up when talking about digital art: copyright and trademark,“ she said, “We're in a space right now where originality is really important. Scarcity—which is a major tenet of being in the art industry, or rubbing up against this idea that I can make copies of something that is now not original. Those are some of the challenges that are not new to the art world, but have become more pronounced in this particular area. And we need to ask how it is that we can create an ecosystem that feels a little bit safer for artists.” For Nyasha, ultimately, the reason this particular legal principle exists in response to the new medium is to ensure parity among creators—so that creators feel the safety of knowing there are ways to protect their art while sharing it with the world.

Meanwhile, Sebastian provided an interesting example of the emerging trend among NFTs, digital art, and major brands, citing the collaboration between Christie’s and the fashion brand Gucci in 2023. “We partnered with Gucci to come up with an exhibition and auction around generative and AI-inspired fashion,” he said, “We worked directly with artists who were commissioned to do this. Another interesting example, working on that project and relating to our IP, is Gucci giving one of the artists tailoring instruction to tailor one of their iconic Gucci coats, and the artist reinterpreted it, and a collector bought that, and it was this artwork that sort of gave you infinite amount of designs for this coat.” On the other hand, Sebastian also stated the tricky part for big brands to enter the digital realm. “The digital art space is very grassroots, so a lot of times people reject these big brands coming into the space if it's not done in an authentic way. Mass people are trying to extract value using well-known IP.” said Sebastian, “it is a tricky space to balance big brands and a grassroots digital art ecosystem. Again, NFT or the digital art community really was founded, by really ‘tech’ people, it wasn't a big space, it was sort of like an anti-art world, and now it's sort of merging.” 

Having co-founded ArtXCode in 2018, a generative art platform that provides a space for digital artists to create generative artworks while exploring collection through digital ownership, Sebastian Sanchez also reflected on the platform’s evolution alongside the rise of digital art. "We'd print the code out, and we'd have to give that to collectors. So we were really ‘physical’ first," he said. The idea of the physical print as the artist’s work was widely accepted. However, when the founder of OpenSea approached the team and requested to purchase only the token, it marked a pivotal step in their transition. “We were like, ‘Why? This makes no sense.’ Then we realized that the token could serve as a proper certificate of authenticity for the print. So we thought, ‘Why not?’ and decided to experiment with it.” 

It wasn’t until Covid hit that they began to seriously experiment with selling on the digital auction platforms. “We were having dinner on the Lower East Side, and we got an email saying, ‘Your work has sold for $5,000.’ We don’t even have to be in a physical space educating people about this type of art, about code, or generative art,” he recalled. “From there, we thought, this is incredible. Eight months later, the Beeple boom happened, and everything took off. He continued, “You could really feel this energy building, especially a month before Beeple’s moment. By February 2021, we had fully transitioned to digital-only.”

Digital Arts As Charity Activism

When discussing NFTs as potential tools for charity activism—or, more broadly, how digital art collaborations can support social causes—Sebastian and Nyasha both shared experiences working on projects that align with this goal. “Earlier this year, we collaborated with UNICEF, in particular their faction called Giga, whose mission is to give students access to the internet across the world. You have the artists working using digital tools and the internet to sell their work, with money going back to powering the internet across the world and helping the cause,” said Sebastian. Nyasha also added to the idea of charity by discussing her work on “Complex Land” and “Complex Con,” an annual festival that merges art, design, and fashion, occasionally incorporating charitable initiatives. “It's always trying to do this marriage of the art with the commerce aspect, but also making sure that the art that the artists are making is authentic to themselves, and to the charitable work that they're trying to do,” she said. 

Echoing the challenges digital artists face in the market, Kevin also shared a more cautionary perspective from the artist side, stressing the critical prerequisite of “alignment” between artists, institutions, and audience for the work to succeed. “From the artist's side, I've seen up close problems with certain organizations looking to digital art, looking to NFTs as potential collaborators, but then not really aligning with what their audience wants the group to be doing, or some other environmental issues. And the whole thing kind of blew up before it got off the ground.”

Meme Culture, Crypto, and the Art Market

Just a few days before the symposium, an auction at Sotheby's captured the art world's attention—Maurizio Cattelan’s banana with duct tape was sold for $6.2 million, and was purchased with Bitcoin by Justin Sun, founder of the blockchain platform Tron Network. On this topic, Sebastian shared the story of the banana meme coin on Twitter that went viral before the sale, and how there was so much chatter about this token as a meme based on the art. “It's like a crazy new world where the internet and digital culture actually manifests into real life art,” he said, “It's very conceptual, and NFT is also very conceptual, so I think those two ideas are similar and sort of borderline. And, the fact that the buyer was a crypto buyer, shows the new momentum of meme, art, culture, crypto, internet culture all combining. It's a little scary, but it's fascinating to see. We'll see how future artwork sales can be affected by memes and crypto culture that lives online manifesting in real life.” Nyasha also linked this phenomenon to the age of influencer marketing, “I have a really interesting perspective on it coming from brand partnership and having seen sort of this, the rise of the influencer era that we're in,” she added, “But, what really sits behind that is it's advertising, it's marketing. It's how we communicate with one another, how we determine what we think is valuable. I think that the auction and art world is starting to get at the beginning of that particular moment of when the conversation is not necessarily at the high level of the art school, but a little bit more amongst the people.”

Another interesting phenomenon around this, stressed Kevin, is how this sale in a way shapes the narrative around the intersection of art, memes, and crypto. “I really like the pieces, it's fun. I think of those things as kind of hostile takeovers,” he said. “They're leveraging the platform for impact that’s outside of the market, kind of like defining a sort of terrain of narrative by doing this big sale. And it doesn't cost them.” He noted the difference between real cost basis and headline market cap. “There certainly is a dollar amount attached to it, but they didn't pay that to acquire the tokens that they're using in the sale. When MetaKovan bought the Beeple piece in 2021 for 16,000 ETH, it had that insane $69 million market cap. He's an insider guy from ETH early on and his cost basis for acquiring those ETH was about 30 grand, so his actual out-of-pocket was much less than what that headline number is,” said Kevin, explaining the potential to leverage the meme's virality to create buzz and consensus, while using crypto to drive sales and shift the conversation beyond traditional market dynamics. “The same thing with Justin. Now, there's a lot of things he could have done with that money. But, you know, the kind of calculation that they're making is: ‘What can I drive with this? What kind of narrative can I get?’ He identified this terrain of art, meme, and crypto in his statement. I think that little triangle that he outlines is absolutely right.” In the age of rapid digitalization, the boundaries between technological innovation and cultural phenomena formed by the internet are increasingly shifting and blurring. As for what the future holds, perhaps, as Kevin emphasized, “The kind of triangle between art, meme, and crypto is likely where all the action is going to be in the next decades.”