The Painters Who Are Embracing NFTs To Grow Their Reach and Increase Their Impact
Damien Hirst and Justin Pierce have done it - who'll be next?
“I don’t know if it’s art, but I know I like it
-Walt Disney
We’ve all looked at renowned works of art and secretly believed we could do better. Most parents have expressed that their 4-year-old child could reproduce some of the world’s most revered pieces of modern art . Some have even conducted experiments to prove the point.
The documentary ‘My Kid Could Paint That’ examined whether artistic merit is inherent within the creation itself or whether that creation needs to have been made by a particular person to have genuine merit or value.
The kid in that documentary allegedly made hundreds of thousands of dollars from their paintings — which proves the point:
It doesn’t matter what the thing is, be that a painting, a sculpture or a physical or virtual token. It doesn’t matter where it originated from or who created it or is responsible for it. If we collectively agree it has a value, then it has value.
This brings us onto NFTs.
Are NFTs art?
The most famous NFT projects to-date have mainly been bespoke collections of limited-edition series’ of JPEGs. Such projects were often derivative of the projects that succeeded before them with their main utility being as profile pictures on social media.
In the beginning there was CryptoPunks - a series of 10,000 minimalist, 26x26 pixel images:
Then came Bored Ape Yacht Club, building on the theme, but with apes as the leading characters:
The Mutant Ape Yacht Club took Bored Apes and applied mutating serums to the beasts, giving them even more bizarre traits and characteristics:
The Baby Ape Mutant Club has taken the Mutant Ape Yacht Club as inspiration - youth is their only differentiating factor:
You get the picture by now I hope.
New projects launch all the time, and many seek to build upon the successes of the last. Some are launched by the same groups and collectives of artists and programmers as have been responsible for past successes. Others are merely ‘aping’ those that have come before them (pun intended).
I’m certainly mocking anyone here, neither those who’ve bought such NFTs or those who created them in the first place.
The four individual NFTs above made a combined 1566 ETH (over $4.7 million at today’s exchange rate) when they were last sold.
But given the proliferation of NFT projects that are based on generating and selling thousands of similar (but slightly different) images at a time, it’s not surprising that many onlookers have a dim and cynical view of what NFTs bring to the world from an artistic perspective.
Given the clear potential for artists to reach a market of motivated (and seemingly, affluent) collectors, it’s unsurprising that artists who’ve made their name via conventional media, whether as photographers, film-makers or painters are exploring the NFT marketplace too.
Damien Hirst - The Currency
You may have heard of the British Artist Damien Hirst - he’s most famously associated with various works of modern art like “The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living” - a Tiger Shark carcass suspended in a tank of formaldehyde.
Hirst is successful and famous. The piece above was reportedly sold for at least $8 million in 2004.
In July 2021, He took his first steps into the world of NFTs by launching his project - ‘The Currency’. You can read more about the project in a separate post, discussing the project and what it means for the concepts of art, money and value, here.
The important things to know about ‘The Currency’, are these:
In 2016, the artist created10,000 unique individual ‘dot paintings’, separately named and numbered, and stored securely. An NFT was minted for each physical painting.
When the public sale opened, each buyer could opt to receive either the physical print, or the NFT with its accompanying digital image - but crucially they had to choose - they couldn’t have both. Each artwork (or NFT) sold for $2,000 each.
At the end of the offer period, all hard-copy paintings corresponding to NFTs that had been retained by owners, were destroyed by Hirst. All NFTs that had been exchanged for the physical paintings were burned on the blockchain (by sending them to a dead wallet).
Hirst was effectively carrying out an experiment to determine where his buyers perceived that the most value existed - with ownership of either the NFT or the physical painting that the NFT represented.
It’s worth noting that buyers who opted for the NFT also received a digital copy of their image too, and hence could print out a copy of the artwork and display it on their wall if they wished.
What happened with the sale?
Available information suggests that buyers of around 2,200 of Hirst’s NFTs chose to retain the digital token rather than exchanging it for the painting. The project’s page on the NFT marketplace OpenSea shows that these tokens are held in around 1,700 crypto wallets right now.
What’s also interesting to note is that the ‘floor price’ for the NFT collection (the lowest price that any have sold for) is currently 4 ETH - equivalent to just over $10k at the time of writing.
It’s not clear whether 7,800 buyers opted to swap their NFT for the physical painting or whether the project failed to sell all 10,000 units.
Either way, some buyers of the original paintings have subsequently offered them for resale. One example will shortly be sold by Philips auctioneers in London with an estimated price in excess of $20,000.
On a superficial level it would seem that the paintings have appreciated in value to a greater extent than the NFTs, but both have appreciated significantly. It would be surprising if this were Hirst’s only venture into the world of NFTs.
And when pre-eminent artists like Hirst are already expanding into NFTs, it’s a fair bet that many others are planning their moves too.
Here’s another example; Justin Pierce, a painter living in Arizona, USA.
J. Pierce & Friends
My first experiment as an NFT investor was bruising to say the least. I selected an NFT project after meticulous research, and minted two of their NFTs hoping that I’d got in on the ground floor of the next big (and lucrative project).
A couple of hundred dollars worth of ETH seemed a small price to pay to learn how to evaluate projects, and to experience first-hand the process of minting NFTs afresh, so I considered it money well spent. I wrote an eBook detailing the process, to share my learning with others.
When I selected and minted two NFTs from a project called ‘The CryptoSaints’ I hoped that once the project finished minting its target 7,777 NFTs, each would gain in value and desirability.
As it happened, the project lost momentum and after a few months it ceased minting when just over 2000 had been purchased. Owners of Crypto Saints were left with their original artwork and prices of these have gradually dwindled since.
I figured that I’d better update my eBook with the lessons learned from the CryptoSaints experiment. It was while researching other projects that I first encountered the artist Justin Pierce, and his NFT project ‘J. Pierce & Friends’
A successful artist ‘in real life’
Justin Pierce is an established artist living in Arizona.
His brightly colored paintings feature energetic and vibrant, stylized images, and he has an established customer base of private and celebrity collectors, including NBA star LeBron James and the actor, Samuel L. Jackson.
At the height of the pandemic, Jackson appeared on Jimmy Kimmel Live while wearing a T-Shirt designed by Pierce.
His work has adorned murals, vehicle wraps and customized sneakers from Nike and Vans. His brightly colored art reflects his inspirations, including the artworks of Andy Warhol.
When I encountered his NFT project I was intrigued to learn more - it was already fully minted (I’d lost out on the opportunity to mint one at its launch price of 0.037 ETH per NFT). My only option would be to buy one in the marketplace at a premium which I did, shortly after discovering the project.
NFTs within the series were generated at the time of minting, each featuring a variety of over 100 individual traits. The combination of traits determines the relative rarity (and hence, value) of NFTs in the series. If you want to know more about how this process works, my eBook on the subject describes it in detail.
Each NFT was assembled using elements that had been hand painted by Justin Pierce himself to create the components that the algorithm assembled at the time of minting, making each unique NFT. Whether you find the art appealing or not will depend on your personal taste, but there can be little doubt that the NFTs are representative of his artwork.
His creative style translates well from physical paintings, into NFTs.
His involvement and enthusiastic engagement with owners and collectors of his NFTs online - on Twitter and within the project Discord channel - are obvious and apparent. He is regularly on TV in his native Arizona, promoting his artwork and broadening awareness of his NFT project and the NFT ecosystem in general.
Rather than the NFTs being generated by a faceless collective of artists and programmers who’ve disappeared upon completion of the project, Pierce seems to recognize that the value of his NFTs will likely lift the value of his creative stock across his career.
He’s clearly committed to treating NFTs as another medium through which to connect with collectors of his artwork, rather than as a one-off source of additional revenue. He’s embracing and exploring the world of NFTs alongside other channels, using it as an additional medium for creative expression.
Most importantly, he seems to be having immense fun in the process.
What does the future hold?
As an investor in J. Pierce & Friends I’m of course hopeful that demand for NFTs will grow, along with the price. I also like the artwork, and I admire the artist’s drive to continue publicising and promoting the project and his art - not just the NFTs but all the other projects that he’s involved with.
As Damien Hirst’s NFT project demonstrated, both the NFTs and the physical paintings that were issued as part of ‘The Currency’ have appreciated in value significantly. That’s more to do with the prestige and value that’s perceived by collectors in owning something that’s associated with him as the creator, rather than intrinsically about the dots on the artwork. That prestige didn’t just arrive overnight when he launched himself as an NFT creator - it came as a result of building the value of his stock as an artist over many years.
It’s a useful reminder that no matter how much we like an artwork from an aesthetic standpoint, a significant part of its value is determined by who created it and the story behind the project. I believe that this is where J. Pierce & Friends (and other NFT projects like it) will stand out from the rest.
Time will tell!
If you’re intrigued to learn more about NFTs and the many ways you can get involved, you can check out this free guide:
If you want a more in-depth overview, I’ve written an eBook that details all you need to know about NFTs conceptually and in practice. You can get that here.