JPEGs, GIFs and cat memes: The weird world of crypto art

The 3D animation painting is casually titled "Summer Vibes". 

In a semicircular glass case, a blue hammock is hinged on two coconut trees on either side. Siraj Hassan, a 31-year-old computer engineer from Chennai created this image, part of his "Caged" series, in February and posted it on OpenSea, a marketplace for "crypto collectables". Soon an art collector evoked an interest in Hassan's digital art and made inquiries.

For 0.015 ethereum (ETH), now considered the second-largest cryptocurrency after bitcoin, Sajjan sold off Summer Vibes to the unknown collector with a Non-Fungible Token (NFT) which in layman's parlance can be considered an Aadhaar or a PAN card for one's artwork—a unique digital id which helps an artist keep track of his/her painting's journey in the market and later claim commissions. 

So when the collector resold Summer Vibes, Hassan got a 5 per cent royalty, roughly Rs 1,000 for a 3D artwork he originally sold for Rs 4,500 in ETH. 

"The value of ethers, they keep changing. One ethereum went up to 1 lakh rupees this year from around Rs 60,000 last year. This is the thing with ethers and NFTs in the crypto marketplace. I can pin-point who has my artwork at any given point and the value they have received after reselling so I also get a share as the original artist," says Hassan who only wandered into 3D arts during lockdown last year. 

He got to know about "crypto art" from a fellow Instagramer in October and in January launched "Caged" which encases surrealist imagery in cookie jar-like glass boxes. Sajjan has so far earned close to Rs 18,000 trading art in ethers. 

Sajjan is rightly inspired by Mike Winklemann, popularly known as Beeple, who sold history's most expensive work of digital art last week for a whopping $69 million. Beeple, who is now being compared to trailblazers like Andy Warhol and Banksy, has been selling digital art with his signature backed by NFTs since last year. Before long, legacy auction house Christie's took note of his work in December and got him to make a collage of his 5,000 previous works. The JPEG image which the famous auction house sold to an unknown Indian-origin crypto investor in Singapore is a square of 21,069x21,069 pixels. 

For an auction house used to selling physical artworks, the departure into digital art means serious business. "It's really a radical gesture to offer for sale something without any object, and we might as well lean into that," said Noah Davis, a specialist in Post-War & Contemporary Art at Christie's in an interview with the Business Insider recently. 

"There's an interesting parallel between Mike and Andy Warhol in the way that their careers developed...Andy also started as an illustrator working in, basically, a gig economy," Davis further added in the same interview, indicating how a global pandemic is reshaping the art market in bewildering ways. 

The digital token called NFTs ensures authentication and ownership for memes and GIFs too. An animated cat meme sold for half a million dollars on February 19. While NFTs have been around for a while—they in fact entered the market as a blockchain game of cat collectables called "crypto kitties" in 2017—its presence boomed in 2020, hitting a market cap of over $338 million.

Even Banksy is reported to have turned one of his original works into an NFT. A blockchain company called Injective Protocol bought Banksy’s original artwork titled “Morons (White)” for $95,000. In typical Banksy daredevilry, the artwork was burnt in a Twitter live stream and the digital version was sold as an NFT for 228.69 ETH on OpenSea.

"This is what some famous artists in the West are doing. They are selling their physical art and the NFT as one unit. Whenever the physical art changes hand, the NFT also changes hands," says Hassan who has firmly latched on to this method of selling artworks among other avenues like many of his peers and artist communes on the interweb.

The share of cryptocurrencies in the Indian art market may be rather small and still-evolving, but it is full of unseen possibilities, says Hassan.