🎨 Metaproof Art

Hey friends, this is Sophia from 🎨 Metaproof Art, the weekly newsletter where we keep you informed on how the metaverse and web3 are changing the art industry. 

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📲 By the numbers

2022: what a year for NFTs. Look back at the numbers from the eventful past year (Source):

• NFT sales by the end of 2022 has totaled over $11B amid the market’s extreme volatility.

• In March, digital artist Beeple sold an NFT for $69M at auction to an investment firm seeking to promote digital art. 

• The Bored Ape Yacht Club, which depicts a series of 10,000 cartoon primates as NFTs, skyrocketed in value in early 2022 following a string of celebrity endorsements. 

• The good came with the bad, with more than $100M worth of NFTs stolen last year. Because NFT transactions are decentralized by design, illegal transfers cannot be reversed by a third party. 

📫 News & trends

🏛️ Decentraland hosts first ever Metaverse Architecture and Design Biennale Embassy

Renowned metaverse platform Decentraland has revealed news of the launch of its upcoming Metaverse Architecture and Design Biennale, collaborating with metaverse agency Metancy and architecture studio Dearch.space to host the launch event on January 6th. 

And what of the metaverse embassy? It will be the first metaverse architecture and design biennial, exhibiting different architectural pieces in the competition. The goal is to welcome like-minded architects to celebrate the festival and connect talents in the industry. 

Open to the public for a month and expected to draw in more than 50,000 visitors (based on Decentraland Art Week’s success), the Biennale will host five days of events and lectures from architecture, metaverse, as well as design industry frontrunners. There will be over 10 expos by well-known names in architecture and design studios globally, and additionally 10 selected artists will showcase their work. 

🌺 Takashi Murakami presents solo exhibition in Dubai

Renowned Japanese artist Takashi Murakami, known for his Superflat aesthetic, is debuting his NFT project Murakami.Flowers at his first solo exhibition in Dubai, featured along with a selection of his iconic paintings, sculptures, and installations. Dubai has recently become a hub for NFTs, blockchain, and crypto, with the government actively promoting these technologies and even announcing its digital currency emCash. Murakami’s world is populated by iconic characters such as Mr. DOB, a mischievous creature inspired by animated figures like Doraemon and Mickey Mouse. The Dubai exhibition includes several new paintings from the Murakami.Flowers series, which is part of the artist’s bigger NFT project featuring pixelated flower paintings that pair his Superflat aesthetic with 1970s Japanese game nostalgia. 

✍🏼 10 artists in the NFT space to follow in 2023

A number of web3 creators and artists, whether big or small, made a splash in 2022 and are deemed worth a follow in 2023. NFT Now picked them via qualitative metrics, or them going beyond the act of selling art and having a “palpable influence” on the ever-changing ecosystem. Emonee LaRussa, an Emmy award-winning motion graphics artist, created NFTs celebrating the 64th Grammy Awards, which she took advantage of to raise $50,000 for her nonprofit JumpStart Designers to provide computers and digital art programs to deserving kids. Wilderness photographer Cath Simard raised environmental awareness, while Daniel Isles a.k.a. Dirty Robot dominated the PFP market last year for creating a new archetype for what large-scale avatars can be. 

🖥 Dasverse introduces ‘art metaverse’ on LG TVS at CES 2023

NFT metaverse and OTT platform firm Dasverse is introducing its art metaverse and dynamic art OTT alongside electronics giant LG at CES 2023. Dasverse’s “Daily Art Story Universe” allows the creation of UHD images that reveal detailed brushstrokes as well as textures of fine artworks. The company also says it has been able to optimize UHD fine artworks and present them on virtual spaces in the metaverse with their technology patents. Art enthusiasts, according to the press release, can now walk inside a virtual museum, interact with their favorite artists, and admire their work in a virtual reality world. Dasverse will also showcase Therapeutic Art OTT Service, recreating masterpiece artworks into a dynamic media clip with music (playable on LG web OS TVs) as a new method of art appreciation. 

🏛️ Top 7 NFT marketplace for artists to sell digital art in 2023

NFTs have become an attractive and lucrative revenue source for artists creating digital art, with a wide variety of marketplaces today for selling and positioning their unique artworks. OpenSea remains one of the largest and most popular NFT marketplaces for artists, offering a wide range of categories and providing the unique “Mint Your Own” option that allows artists to create and sell NFTs without any upfront costs. MakersPlace, Rarible, and Mintable are other top choices, alongside CryptoKitties, Axie Infinity, and SuperRare. 

🦿 AI and art are at loggerheads! Yet NFTs and metaverse endure

2022 saw the NFT market fall by 60% in the last quarter from 2021 levels, but what still holds NFT enthusiasts is its democratizing ability. To date, however, only cartoons and memes have dominated the NFT environment with projects like CryptoPunks and Bored Ape Yacht Club taking the spotlight. There’s the promise of AI to further progress and retrain itself, making the space more ripe for NFTs and the metaverse. In fact, Big Tech has already walked down the NFT path with big-ticket collaborations, from Google helping the AI artist community to IBM Cloud & Watson Studio. NFTs are perceived as the future AI art for reasons beyond decentralization; NFTs not only look unique but also generate an abstract feeling in individuals. They will prove to be the disruptive element they set out to be, for both aesthetic and functional reasons. 

❓Explainer: What are NFTs, and how do they work? 

The idea is that NFTs create scarcity for digital objects, enabling a novel type of traceable digital ownership. A digital asset like an image or video, in principle, could appear several times over on the internet. Yet only a few instances of it - or perhaps just one - would have the provenance of an NFT. NFTs also don’t necessarily hold the data for the asset itself nor do they necessarily transfer copyright. Usually an NFT contains a URL linking to the asset, which is stored on a different computer network. Learn more about NFTs, how they can be used, existing criticisms against these digital assets, and what likely lies ahead. 

🔛 LG Art Lab partners with Blade Labs to introduce new upgrades to its NFT marketplace

The LG Art Lab of global electronics brand LG has collaborated with enterprise web3 solution provider Blade Labs to launch Blade Wallet, touted as a fully audited, self-custody, enterprise-grade web3 wallet. Blade Labs is said to introduce simple, secure purchasing of NFTs among users, who can now purchase nFT art via the platform on their LG Smart TVs. The LG team, too, has introduced mutually agreed royalties to the NFTs available through its marketplace. In this move aiming to champion artist rights, artists automatically receive royalties each time their work is sold and re-sold, without requiring additional intervention. 

⚜️ NFTs, AI and the metaverse set to continue redefining art in 2023

In the NFT world, 2022 was a year of taking the good with the bad, with triumphs and crises making it a memorable one. Artists like Takashi Murakami entered the arena and lent much-needed credibility, yet there’s also news such as Christie’s logging a staggering 96% decline in NFT sales over the course of the year. The legitimacy of NFTs as an artistic medium was one dominant conversation, while others simply wondered how the technology best applied in the creative field. There’s big talk of NFTs as a democratizing force, but their ability to truly empower creators and enrich communities was yet to be shown on a wide scale. Here, National News also discussed the rise of AI and the merit of the metaverse in the art field. 

📝 NFT art series to help you stick to your resolutions even after the first week

Digital marketing agency Lion & Lion has embarked on a limited-edition, tongue-in-cheek project called Resolutions NFT series which - replete with motion graphics, generative art, original digital music, and typography design - seeks to help people stick to their intentions and resolutions. Its team combed through global data on the world’s most popular New Year’s resolutions from 2019 to 2022, and looked at the top 10 resolutions people failed to keep. These were transformed into artistic NFTs, with each piece serving as a smart contract for the collectors. The NFT series will be released in various blockchains but will debut with Objkt.com.

🤖 Opinion: The year AI art went mainstream

AI is thought to have come so far that it’s hard to recall that in the beginning it wasn’t intended to be art at all. Nobody really asked for AI, yet its innovative nature has brought us to where it is today. In one of the possible futures that await as “creative” endeavors become increasingly automated, AI does the drudge work of the culture sector, with “no more painters paying the bills as commercial illustrators” and the artist gaining renewed reverence. The most likely scenario: Human artists will use various AI tools and technologies to enrich their practice. 

👨‍👩‍👧‍👧 5 NFTs people have minted onto their skin

NFT love is real - so much so that some people have decided to represent their favorite NFTs IRL permanently by way of tattooing. As a show of solidarity with a community-wide push to raise the rektguy NFT collection to a 1 ETH floor price on OpenSea in December, project co-founder OSF delivered a promise to get a tattoo of his iconic creation once the goal was met. To date, the collection sits at a 1.65 ETH floor price on OpenSea. Rapper Gunna also got inked as he purchased a Bored Ape Yacht Club NFT in the NFT bull run of late 2021 for over $300,000. The sensible next step: deepen the bond with his ape, getting a tattoo of his self-named NFT Butta on his leg. 

🐱 Async recap of 2022

Async, a creator platform for generative art and music NFT collections, opened up the Async Art to everyone in August 2022 to lower the barrier of entry for entering the web3 space. Shortly after, Async added more features for creators, including artist-deployed contracts, time-limited collections, and free-mint (collectors only pay for the gas fee of minting to reward them and draw in new fans). The previous year also marked strategic partnerships for the creator platform, including those with SuperRare, OneOf, HIFI Labs, and BeetsDAO, while the Async x SuperRare tie-up kicked off with an exclusive drop from crypto artist Osinachi. For 2023, Async teased Dynamic Blueprints, showcasing dynamic and generative NFTs for creators and brands - an “inclusive, interactive way” to enter web3. 

🖼️ NFT art generator & publisher launches at NEAR

Blockchain development company RadianceTeam has launched its NFT art generator and publisher app, enabling NFT creation “at a scale and degree of ease never before seen on the blockchain.” The launch is the newest in the NEAR blockchain ecosystem, with the collection builder offering a range of tools and features exclusive to NEAR users. These include the ability to create thousands of NFT art pieces to be published and put up for sale, according to its press release. The app is touted as a step toward democratizing NFT creation and allowing “universal accessibility” because there’s no prior coding knowledge required. 

🐇 Artists use boundless imagination to create a future for Chinese zodiac’s Rabbit

Chinese artist Li Na’s Miss Rabbit digital art collection, back in June 2022, contains over 10 million images of bunnies wearing different costumes and ornaments amid various backgrounds. Others have also used the rabbit to tell human tales in their digital artworks. Digital art collection Koorabbee, which translates to “cool rabbit,” is one example. In the future, digital artworks are likely to explode in numbers and diversity of types, with the rabbit staking out territory in the digital realm and the metaverse. It’s the Year of the Rabbit after all and Chinese consumers are looking for further connections and interactions with the beloved bunny. 

🎨 Five world-renowned artists are in their element at Galloire Dubai

A group exhibition titled Elemental Perception makes waves at Galloire, City Walk in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, bringing together five world-renowned artists. Among them is Miguel Chevalier, considered a digital art forerunner whose MetaCities work captivates while bringing forth important questions on urbanization, ever-taller towers, and the metaverse looming ahead. Since the 198s, Chevalier has created many projects incorporating generative and interactive VR installations projected on large scale, shown on LED or LCD screens.

💸 Finance buzz

• Morningstar Ventures, a Dubai-based investment firm specializing in digital assets and blockchain technology, has invested over $5M in its first interactive and immersive digital art gallery called 37xDubai. (Source)

• Hologram company Proto, whose displays can showcase NFTs, joins auction house Christie’s VC portfolio after multiple collaborations as its fourth portfolio company after multiple collaborations. (Source)

• Artist and CEO Erick Calderon a.k.a. Snow Fro generates $1.4B in sales - and growing - in generative art sales through his company Art Blocks. While generative art has been around for decades, the Art Blocks platform allows creative coders to have a place to mint and sell their creations directly to collectors. (Source)

🗣️ Quote of the week

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All content on this newsletter is for informational purposes only and does not aim to serve as or replace expert investment advice.

If you are a startup building in the metaverse / web3 ecosystem and are raising capital, please reach out to Sfermion. Sfermion is an investment firm focused on accelerating the emergence of the metaverse.

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