NFT enthusiast Vignesh Sundaresan paid $69 million to purchase Beeple’s “Everydays: The First 5000 Days” in a Christie’s auction. The work, comprising 5,000 digital pictures, is a massive jpeg. For all that money and all those pixels, though, where do you display it? It’s a question that’s increasingly asked by collectors as digital-based art becomes more mainstream.
Collectors commonly live with art in their homes or share it with the public through museum loans. Either way, it occupies physical space in their lives. Digital-based art is harder to pin down—or rather, put up.
Locked in a Dungeon With Your NFTs
The Beeple will inhabit its own metaverse-based museum, according to Sundaresan. It’s easy to picture what it will look like since his NFT fund, Metapurse, already built such a museum for a cache of Beeples it owned prior to this latest purchase.
Art critic Ben Davis checked out that existing exhibit in March, but found it to be a poorly curated experience, created by developers and cryptocurrency purveyors and not by anyone in the art world. “This doesn’t give the sense that you are showing off things you are proud of; it gives the sense that you are locked in a dungeon with them,” Davis wrote on Artnet.
Other, better formats for appreciating digital art in such a space will likely exist in the future, but for now there are some IRL ones that function fairly well.
Browse online art brokerage Artsy and you’ll come across Rachel Rossin’s “Scrubbing 1, Maquette,” a piece that is spread out between paintings, VR, and screen projections. Tamas Banovich, co-owner of Postmasters, the gallery representing Rossin, says a buyer would receive all of its parts: the paintings, a specialized gaming computer, an Oculus Rift that attaches to a ceiling track, a suspendable screen, and a projector, all installed in situ by the gallery.
This would enable the collector and those they choose to share the piece with to fully experience Rossin’s literally moving work. Here, a person wearing the headset causes a home interior to explode as they approach and reconstitute as they retreat. Those experiencing the work in the room witness the destruction in projections; the visored person is represented as a shadow wreaking havoc.
Banovich says Postmasters, which accepts cryptocurrency as payment, is not new to digital art. It’s worked with digital artists since 1991 and hosted the large-scale digital art show “Can You Digit?” in 1996. In two decades, not much has changed with digital art beyond hardware upgrades, he says. The newest thing has been the volume of interest. “[I]t is a great moment of optimism. I was lucky to experience a similar moment at the beginnings of the internet,” he says.
NFTs: A Trendy Wrapper for Digital Art
Banovich says NFTs are trendy but ultimately “just a wrapper” for digital and non-digital art. They have fueled the purchase of digital art, though, and thus indirectly affect how it’s displayed. Luma Canvas, for example, is an LED canvas tied to an app that syncs an NFT collection from a user’s wallet. It’s debuting at the LA Art Show this week.
Some NFT-purchased art comes with its own display, as is the case with the Genesis edition release of the NFTy iMirror, a mirrored 4K touch-screen display that comes with a mountain scene featuring an animated red canoe. It connects to a wallet so other works of crypto-purchased art can be swapped out.
Infinite Objects, which “prints” moving images in 5×7-inch acrylic or bamboo frames, has an artist registry that lets collectors print their NFTs to a frame and allows the artist to limit the number of prints that can be made.
Infinite Objects COO Roxy Fata says the demand for displaying NFTs has been colossal. “Ever since our partnership with Beeple in December of last year, people have had an incredible appetite for bringing NFTs into the physical world.”
Though Infinite Objects lets users upload mp4s and MOVs of their own to print out, there are safeguards against people stealing intellectual property.
“Uploading IP that isn’t yours on the Creator Tool violates our terms of service, and we’ve actually been canceling a ton of orders to ensure creators maintain the right to decide what happens to their IP,” she says. “Each order is manually reviewed to confirm this doesn’t happen, and we’re working on implementing additional AI solutions”
For people who want to purchase digital art that can be shown off in their homes but who don’t want the aggravations of dealing with cryptocurrency, Infinite Objects sells curated collections in collaboration with places like new media arts organization Rhizome.
The same familiar principle of limited-edition prints pertains to the pieces in the curated collections. “Being able to hold and collect [Infinite Objects] finally brings scarcity and value to digital assets in the physical world,” Fata says. “Artists couldn’t be more thrilled about having their work permanently treated on an object, and collectors love enjoying their favorite moving art without interruption or gadgetry.”
Of course, one of the simplest processes to putting up digital art (NFT-purchased or not) in a space is to upload files to frames made to fit that purpose. There are plenty on the market from Meural, Lenovo, and Canvia.
“Now that there are so many artists and brands creating NFTs, the experience of ownership becomes much more important,” Fata says. “Collectors are purchasing works they love; they’re not just engaging in speculative transactions. They want to experience and show off their investments.”
Of the many intangible joys of owning art that does not change is that it’s a tangible display of taste.
