Disclaimer: If you’re sick and tired of hearing about NFTs, I totally get it, no problem. But if you’re skeptical or critical of them or if you don’t really get what this whole crypto art thing is, I encourage you to read on. My own thoughts on crypto art are still very much evolving, and I see my own involvement as entirely experimental, but as a former (and current) crypto art skeptic, I think what follows might surprise you.

Around this time last year, a couple of artists that I follow on Twitter started posting about pieces that they were selling as “cryptoart”. As I scrolled my timeline, it was peppered here and there with words like “minting”, “drop”, and “NFT”. At the time, these were rare instances, but fast forward a year, and today many Twitter users are muting these words because they’re so sick of hearing them.

In the last few months, cryptoart has exploded. The volume of artwork being sold on crypto platforms has jumped to nearly 100 Million in February, with a total value of over $220 Million at the time of writing. But the issue has become incredibly divisive, causing a schism between people hoping to capitalize on the craze and those who argue the downsides outweigh the benefits.

I’ve followed the field for a year now, watching folks in the generative art and design communities explore the space. And recently, I began a limited test of crypto art myself (both selling and collecting). On the whole, I’ve been highly critical of cryptoart (for reasons explained below), but the recent development of hic et nunc, a platform built on the Tezos blockchain, gives me hope. To understand why, we need to back up a bit and understand what an NFT actually is, and the pros and cons of cryptoart.

WTF is an NFT?

For the purposes of this discussion, just know that an NFT is a certificate of authenticity. It’s powered by blockchain technology, which is not important beyond the fact that it’s how they are verified and makes it impossible to duplicate or fake the certificate. Certificates of authenticity are important with physical art as well, and are often distributed with originals. But with digital artwork, the problem is multiplied, since there’s really no way to prevent people from just downloading your gif or image when it’s shared online.

Enter NFTs: when you buy a piece of digital art through a crypto art exchange, you’re buying the NFT, the certificate of authenticity. Other people are welcome to download that image, but only the holder of the NFT is the true owner of the original. When an artist creates this certificate they “mint” a new NFT, and when they sell their newly minted NFT, it’s often called a “drop” which may consist of a single limited edition, or multiple editions. Since the NFT technology relies on the blockchain, you use cryptocurrency (typically Ethereum) to buy them, hence the crypto in crypto art.

The good

When I first heard of cryptoart, it all sounded a bit silly. People selling digital files? Cmon. But then, we buy digital files every day in the form of software or music that we could easily pirate, so why not art? And for animated gifs, there’s really no other medium.

Perhaps the biggest advantage is that many deserving artists are able to make a living and get paid a fair price for their work. There’s a lot of caveats and issues about who makes the money and how much, but on the whole, I’m a big fan of artists having other avenues to make good money for their work.

Finally, as artist Joanie Lemercier has noted, living as a professional artist can have quite a high carbon impact. Flying around the world to attend gallery openings, and shipping prints or other physical objects around the world is not exactly eco-friendly. In theory, cryptoart is poised to improve this, by allowing artists to distribute their work without ever leaving their home and by sending nothing more than a digital file… in practice, it’s a different story.

The bad

Currently, the vast majority of cryptoart happens on the Ethereum blockchain, in a way that is extremely damaging for the environment. It’s so bad that a single drop may consume as much electricity as the average human would in 40+ years. The issue was first analyzed by Memo Akten, which prompted artist and climate activist Joanie LeMercier to cancel a planned drop and publish a critique of his own. There’s been some debate over the precise impact of cryptoart, but nearly everyone agrees it’s an environmental disaster and not sustainable in its current state. Wired recently did an excellent write-up of the issue.

The ugly

Blockchain evangelists love to throw around words like “authentic”, “secure”, “immutable”. But what happens when someone takes a piece of digital art they didn’t create, and mint it as their own NFT? You get an unchangeable, immutable, and unrecoverable art theft. Predictably, that has already happened to numerous artists, many of whom wished to eschew the NFT market for the above mentioned ecological concerns. One project, MarbleCards, has already traded over $800,000 of stolen work on the OpenSea NFT marketplace.

Then there’s the issue of who benefits from the crypto craze. This is tough because many of these issues are multi-faceted and not easily categorized into good or bad. For example, on the one hand the crypto world slants towards rich white tech bros, and although I haven’t seen any data, there’s a feeling in the community that the NFT market is largely white, and that wealthy tech industry professionals are those benefitting the most. On the other hand, the ease of access and option for relative anonymity has benefitted many. People who previously couldn’t afford to reach the lucrative upper echelons of the gallery world can all of a sudden pay their rent and pay off debts thanks to NFT sales.

Here and now

Given all the above concerns, I judged crypto art was bad for the world and decided I would not participate. But last week, I saw several artists I respect, who had been sharp critics of NFTs, jumping into the market. Even Joanie LeMercier, cited above for his potent critique of the ecological impact of NFTs, announced he would mint several new pieces, but using a brand new platform called hic et nunc (latin for here and now).

Hic et nunc is an experiment. It is a new crypto art marketplace that allows users to mint, sell, and collect NFTs on the Tezos blockchain, a system that has roughly 1000 times less energy consumption than Ethereum. Because Tezos uses a Proof-of-Stake system rather than the more common Proof-of-Work method, minting an NFT on hit et nunc uses less energy than sending this newsletter. The carbon efficiency of Tezos has even spawned a new hashtag #EcoNFT, something I would’ve laughed at a week ago.

The ecological benefits may have hooked me, but the overall feeling of hit et nunc is what pushed me to mint my first NFT. For starters, the craze of Ethereum platforms hasn’t hit yet, and “expensive” is a few hundred dollars (rather than the thousands you would pay on Ethereum). Most artworks are just a few bucks, or even free. It is totally anonymous: no profile pictures, no names, no artist bios, just a big “X” and a random string of numbers representing the person’s crypto address.

Where the popular Ethereum platforms have all the slick design and carefully measured edginess that reek of a techy scam, hit et nunc has the ungainly charm of Windows 95. Its interface is so clunky that a reddit user had to make a 23-step guide with screenshots showing exactly how to mint a new NFT using the platform.

In these early days, the community is still small and things have just the right amount of weirdness. Scroll through the gallery (just a single column on the homepage) and you’ll find spinning generative art gifs, posters from graphic designers, traditional paintings, home made memes, and yes, pictures of cats. I don’t know how long this will remain. I’m sure that if it really catches on, the platform will face challenges as the crypto speculators and greedy vultures descend upon it. But for now, it has a certain nostalgia of the old internet that is both refreshing and comforting. I sure hope it lasts.

Is any of this real?

From the beginning, despite the good, bad, and ugly, my feeling towards cryptoart has been “why?” Why would someone want to pay real money for a digital file that they can already download or see on their computer? The whole thing just felt fake, especially when compared to the physical artwork you could be spending money on instead.

But with the ecological concerns assuaged, I decided I should give cryptoart a fair trial before I rendered final judgement. So I minted a couple of my favorite pieces of art I’ve made over the last year. I was shocked and flattered when I saw the first few sales of my own NFTs. (Shameless plug, if you’re interested in this sort of thing, I still have a couple editions you can collect for a very reasonable price, and I’ll be minting a couple more pieces next week.)

I was just experimenting, so I took my profits and reinvested them by collecting some NFTs from other artists on hit et nunc. I bought art from Matt DesLauries, Frederik Vanhoutte, and several others I respect. And weirdly, it felt good. Rather than feeling scammed, I actually felt proud to own these digital objects and support other artists, and I was surprised that the feeling of ownership was genuine. Then as I was browsing the hic et nunc gallery, I saw a picture of lettuce, only it was warped, slightly artificial looking. I knew right away it was from one of my favorite artists, Helena Sarin. I feverishly refreshed the page trying to be the first to hit collect. But alas, the work was priced at 100 TEZ (the Tezos currency) and I only had 30 in my wallet. Probably a good thing to save me from burning a hole in my pocket, but that feeling of desire to own the piece was strong, it was real.

Where do I go from here

After my experiment, I’m still sort of conflicted about NFTs. There’s no denying that the vast majority of the market is driven by speculation and many people are taking advantage of the bubble with no heed for the environmental impact of Ethereum.

But it seems that there may be a future with hic et nunc, and other upcoming eco-friendly NFT platforms. Personally, I’m still most interested in creating more physical objects out of my art, and that remains my top priority. But for the next couple weeks I will cautiously explore the cryptoart space (obviously only using hic et nunc). The first question I’m curious about is whether there’s actually any demand for the kind of art I produce, or if my initial few sales were just due to the newness of the platform and people trying to boost engagement.

The whole digital art world is still mostly a popularity contest, and while I have a decent number of Twitter followers, I doubt many of them are interested in cryptocurrency and this type of art. To see if there’s any worth in persuing this, I’ll start by dropping one of my most precious pieces tomorrow, the gif that resulted from my first ever generative art system. I called this piece Shattered Menagerie. It was a combination of hand-drawn work to make the outlines, and a generative algorithm that tessellated the images using Delaunay and Voronoi tessellations. The color palette was inspired by Piet Mondrian, and as an animated gif, an NFT seems like the perfect way to share this piece. Given the monumental amount of work that went into this piece, and the special place it holds for me, I will release it as a single limited edition and it will be priced a little higher (though still reasonable). I sort of doubt anyone on this newsletter will have a Tezos wallet set up and be interested in collecting NFTs, but if so you can check my Twitter for announcements about the art. Here’s hoping that it works, and that this new platform could actually be a new way to support artists from all walks of life without destroying the planet.