Pioneering digital art platform SuperRare is hosting the first ever documentary fundraiser through a curated collection of artworks. The auction is taking place this month for feature-length documentary “Minted” – developed by female-led independent production company Unleyek and design-house 19.studio, about the revolution of NFTs within the art industry. 

 

On 20th January 2022, The Minted Series launched as the first endeavour to fundraise a film through a digital exhibition on SuperRare. The collection boasts work by some of the most critically acclaimed artists and collectors in the SuperRare community, including Lans King, 33NFT, Dimitri Daniloff among others. The exhibition will also auction 10 limited edition, purposely designed posters for the documentary, created by digital designer Giacomo Pollesel at 19.studio, inspired by classic artworks translated into a coded-dynamic series, highlighting the transition of the established industry towards modern technologies. 

 

The exhibition will be held natively on SuperRare’s site - www.superrare.com – where supporters of NFT art and the documentary can purchase the exclusive pieces. Collectors will subsequently receive their NFT, production credits in the documentary and exclusive access to the film premiere and behind the scenes during the film’s production.

 

SuperRare is the leading marketplace to collect and trade unique, single-edition digital artworks as NFTs. With a curated selection of artists, they maintain a beautiful standard of works along with a prevailing sense of community. Unleyek is a production company who aim to uncover untold stories through a new lens. The group already have three productions underway and an award under their belt within a year of being founded. Their partners, 19.studio, are a digital creative studio working at the intersection digital and physical by leveraging art and technology together, exploiting the most contemporary techniques to embody algorithms in their craft. 

 

The documentary, titled Minted, is a look inside what the NFT art market is, a journey of how we got here, and where there is still to go. The film intends on exploring the communities who have developed this technology under the surface for years, alongside artists' philosophies behind their drive for a more crypto-integrated world. Minted showcases the everyday in the whirlwind that is NFTs and how they are reshaping the power dynamics that drive creativity in this turning-point in art history.

 

The art industry's transition into NFTs has been one of the most abrupt, paradigm-shifting events in modern art history. The headlining sales in early 2021 marked a pivotal cultural moment, bringing about a new, dynamic, and democratic era for the art industry.

 

Independent filmmakers have long struggled to maintain creative control over their projects, with numerous mountains to climb before the chance of starting to film. Many creatives must compromise their creativity for income, with the chance to create their own work becoming harder to achieve. By leveraging on an original funding method for this documentary, the creators hope to expand the application of NFTs and how they have democratised the art space by bringing them into the realm of film. Minted intends to carry on this message by displaying the true nature of how the application of NFTs can help creatives gain sovereignty over their own work at long last. 

 

This original collective fundraiser is a step forward for independent creatives to be non-conformist. With the support of the powerhouse SuperRare, The Minted Series aims to fund the first ever documentary about NFTs by utilising the power of NFTs in this digital exhibition.

 

 

More..

What is an NFT? Read the amazing article by Mitchell Clark for the Verge  down here!

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WHAT DOES NFT STAND FOR?

Non-fungible token.

That doesn’t make it any clearer.

Right, sorry. “Non-fungible” more or less means that it’s unique and can’t be replaced with something else. For example, a bitcoin is fungible — trade one for another bitcoin, and you’ll have exactly the same thing. A one-of-a-kind trading card, however, is non-fungible. If you traded it for a different card, you’d have something completely different. You gave up a Squirtle, and got a 1909 T206 Honus Wagner, which StadiumTalk calls “the Mona Lisa of baseball cards.” (I’ll take their word for it.)

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How do NFTs work?

At a very high level, most NFTs are part of the Ethereum blockchain. Ethereum is a cryptocurrency, like bitcoin or dogecoin, but its blockchain also supports these NFTs, which store extra information that makes them work differently from, say, an ETH coin. It is worth noting that other blockchains can implement their own versions of NFTs. (Some already have.)

What’s worth picking up at the NFT supermarket?

NFTs can really be anything digital (such as drawings, music, your brain downloaded and turned into an AI), but a lot of the current excitement is around using the tech to sell digital art. 

Dogecoin isn’t an NFT. But this GIF of a dogecoin is

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 GIF: NyanCat on OpenSea

You mean, like, people buying my good tweets?

I don’t think anyone can stop you, but that’s not really what I meant. A lot of the conversation is about NFTs as an evolution of fine art collecting, only with digital art. 

(Side note, when coming up with the line “buying my good tweets,” we were trying to think of something so silly that it wouldn’t be a real thing. So of course the founder of Twitter sold one for just under $3 million shortly after we posted the article.)

Do people really think this will become like art collecting?

I’m sure some people really hope so — like whoever paid almost $390,000 for a 50-second video by Grimes or the person who paid $6.6 million for a video by Beeple. Actually, one of Beeple’s pieces was auctioned at Christie’s, the famou—

Yoink!

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 Image: Beeple

Sorry, I was busy right-clicking on that Beeple video and downloading the same file the person paid millions of dollars for.

Wow, rude. But yeah, that’s where it gets a bit awkward. You can copy a digital file as many times as you want, including the art that’s included with an NFT.

But NFTs are designed to give you something that can’t be copied: ownership of the work (though the artist can still retain the copyright and reproduction rights, just like with physical artwork). To put it in terms of physical art collecting: anyone can buy a Monet print. But only one person can own the original.

No shade to Beeple, but the video isn’t really a Monet.

What do you think of the $3,600 Gucci Ghost? Also, you didn’t let me finish earlier. That image that Beeple was auctioning off at Christie’s ended up selling for $69 million, which, by the way, is $15 million more than Monet’s painting Nymphéas sold for in 2014.

This last sold for $3,600, but the current owner is asking for $16,300.

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 GIF by Trevor Andrew

Whoever got that Monet can actually appreciate it as a physical object. With digital art, a copy is literally as good as the original.

But the flex of owning an original Beeple...

I think I remember hearing that NFTs are already over. Didn’t the boom go bust?

But surely you’ve heard of penguin communities?

P...Penguin communities?

Right, so... people have long built communities based on things they own, and now it’s happening with NFTs. One community that’s been exceedingly popular revolves around a collection of NFTs called Pudgy Penguins, but it’s not the only community built up around the tokens. It could be argued that one of the earliest NFT projects, CryptoPunks, has a community around it, and there are other animal-themed projects like the Bored Ape Yacht Club that have their own clique. 

Of course, the communal activities depend on the community. For Pudgy Penguin or Bored Ape owners, it seems to involve vibing and sharing memes on Discord, or complimenting each other on their Pudgy Penguin Twitter avatars.

What’s the point of NFTs?

That really depends on whether you’re an artist or a buyer. 

I’m an artist.

First off: I’m proud of you. Way to go. You might be interested in NFTs because it gives you a way to sell work that there otherwise might not be much of a market for. If you come up with a really cool digital sticker idea, what are you going to do? Sell it on the iMessage App Store? No way.

Also, NFTs have a feature that you can enable that will pay you a percentage every time the NFT is sold or changes hands, making sure that if your work gets super popular and balloons in value, you’ll see some of that benefit.

I’m a buyer.

One of the obvious benefits of buying art is it lets you financially support artists you like, and that’s true with NFTs (which are way trendier than, like, Telegram stickers). Buying an NFT also usually gets you some basic usage rights, like being able to post the image online or set it as your profile picture. Plus, of course, there are bragging rights that you own the art, with a blockchain entry to back it up.

No, I meant I’m a collector.

Ah, okay, yes. NFTs can work like any other speculative asset, where you buy it and hope that the value of it goes up one day, so you can sell it for a profit. I feel kind of dirty for talking about that, though.

So every NFT is unique?

In the boring, technical sense that every NFT is a unique token on the blockchain. But while it could be like a van Gogh, where there’s only one definitive actual version, it could also be like a trading card, where there’s 50 or hundreds of numbered copies of the same artwork.

Who would pay hundreds of thousands of dollars for what basically amounts to a trading card?

Well, that’s part of what makes NFTs so messy. Some people treat them like they’re the future of fine art collecting (read: as a playground for the mega-rich), and some people treat them like Pokémon cards (where they’re accessible to normal people but also a playground for the mega-rich). Speaking of Pokémon cards, Logan Paul just sold some NFTs relating to a million-dollar box of the—

Please stop. I hate where this is going.

You’ve activated my trap card (which sold for $17,000).

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Image by Logan Paul

Yeah, he sold NFT video clips, which are just clips from a video you can watch on YouTube anytime you want, for up to $20,000. He also sold NFTs of a Logan Paul Pokémon card.

Who paid $20,000 for a video clip of Logan Paul?!

A fool and their money are soon parted, I guess?

It would be hilarious if Logan Paul decided to sell 50 more NFTs of the exact same video.

Linkin Park’s Mike Shinoda (who also sold some NFTs that included a song) actually talked about that. It’s totally a thing someone could do if they were, in his words, “an opportunist crooked jerk.” I’m not saying that Logan Paul is that, just that you should be careful who you buy from.

 

 

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