NFT Art & Music: The Current State of NFTs From the Creators’ Perspective

By Joy Loftus

This week’s NFT.NYC Weekly Clubhouse Happy Hour brought together expert voices from the NFT Art and Music communities.

Raymond St. Martin, CEO of Esaiyo, set the tone of the conversation when he said:

“These digital assets are starting to have a life of their own.”

Wednesday’s conversation featured six speakers from the upcoming NFT.NYC 2021 in the NFT art and music community, alongside a number of Clubhouse guests who were invited to the stage to speak later in the hour.

Several of this Week’s Speakers

Follow This Week’s Clubhouse Featured Speakers:

1. Olive Allen, @oliveallen
2. Arghtee, @arghtee
3. Jen Heck, @lokal-artist
4. Sam Janssen, @samjstudios
5. Micol Apruzzese, @micolvertical
6. Richard Rivera, @ronindacc

Read on to find out more about:

• How are artists using NFTs?
• The importance of building community to sell NFT art
• Video NFTs

How are artists using NFTs?

Our first speaker at the podium this week, Jen Heck, an award-winning filmmaker and producer, spoke about the intersection of film and NFTs.

Jen predicts that “NFTs for filmmakers may play a role in how we raise money…people can buy into a film NFT project even with a small amount of money, and then depending on the film’s box-office success, make more money from this initial investment from a secondary sale.”

Film and NFTs with Jen Heck

Jen has been experimenting with NFTs to determine how she can best use them to reach her artistic and production goals. She told the Clubroom: “I started making NFTs simply to understand them,” and explaining what drew her to NFTs said:

“I liked the freedom of having one small thing that wasn’t attached to a larger distributor.”

Her personal work incorporates hand-filmed pieces made from real images and experiences. Beyond her personal work, she is curious about how the film industry at large can use NFTs.

She lists her personal NFT collections on her NFT alias website “LKLART” as well as on NFT marketplaces like Nifty Gateway and Foundation.

Olive Allen Talks Art and NFTs

Olive Allen, who has been a Speaker at NFT.NYC in past years, talked about how she has been creating art with NFTs; She spoke to the audience about her NFT collection “HYPEBIRDS” and the intriguing spin she put on this NFT drop.

The crypto art visionary told the room that she had been wanting to experiment with fractional ownership for a while and saw her chance with this collection. She paired the HypeBirds, in scarce packs, with pieces of a fractionalized painting entitled “Something”. When an NFT buyer purchased one of these scarce packs, they were given the option to receive either a HypeBird or one of 196 pieces of the fractionalized painting “Something” — each of these pieces was named “A piece of Something.”

Olive attributed a different degree of scarcity to each of the Hypebirds, and in the collection’s final auction, when the buyer was offered the choice between the 196th piece of “Something” or a Gold HypeBird, the buyer curiously chose the Hypebird; Olive has explained that this is one example of how her NFT artwork is imbued with rich symbolic meaning for the digital age:

“The Collector going after a shiny golden object symbolizes the flaws in modern values — our focus on instant gratification. Chasing the hype makes us lose sight of the bigger picture.”

The importance of building community to sell NFT art

One route to successful NFT art sales is having one’s art connected to a valuable NFT community. On this week’s happy hour, one collector spoke about how to build a community around NFTs.

Selling NFT Art with Ronin the Collector

Ronin the Collector has been spending a considerable amount of time lately exploring how to expand his NFT community and help people scale their NFT projects to reach a wider audience. He offered the Clubroom a part of his origin story: “Collecting digital items for most of my life, though not connected to the blockchain, has led me to understand that NFTs have value.”

Ronin also discussed a strong use case of how he is using NFTs to create social engagement, grow his NFT community, and help NFT creators sell their work.

Ronin, alongside his partners, is a creator of the LADZ network — a crypto content network. The mission of the network is to: “Tokenize LADZ to create sustainable value capture and growth for EVERY MEMBER of the community, not just the creators or top organizers.”

The network has launched LADZ tokens which are branded digital tokens that are unique to the LADZ network and allow members to own, control, and coordinate value across their network.

This model incentivizes people to engage with LADZ network content. The success of the network and the NFT artists featured on it is coactive; The more value a crypto content network like LADZ collects, the more favorable the outcome for artists using the platform.

Video NFTs

Sam Janssen is an NFT video artist. Speaking about the style of their work, they say: “I like to think my creative approach to design is unapologetic and borderline absurd.

They spoke Wednesday on the complexity of their work and how NFTs have allowed them to embrace this: “My work incorporates many elements; NFTs give musicians and artists free rein to create art that may be more challenging to sell on a traditional marketplace.”

Janssen talked about friends they have in the NFT arena who have begun to incorporate more audio into their collections. They say this has been possible for them because the space gives artists the flexibility to perform experiments outside of their usual mediums and define their artistic identity on their own terms.

In Conclusion — NFT Art is just the beginning

NFT.NYC has received over 250 speaker applications and approved 125.

If you’re passionate about NFTs and have an interesting use case to share with the community, please apply at our website NFT.NYC.

Speaker applications close July 31st, 2021.

Weekly Clubhouse “Happy Hour” sessions will be hosted every Wednesday at 4 pm ET in the NFT.NYC Club.
Wednesday, May 12th, will feature speakers from the Collectibles and Gaming space within the NFT community.

Follow us on Twitter @NFT_NYC for additional details coming soon.

Still not sure what an NFT actually is?

NFT.NYC is releasing an NFT 101 Guide to spell it out for you.(Prerelease version here)

Frequently Asked Questions

How to sell NFT art?

NFT creators have a range of marketplaces to choose from when it comes to finding a place to sell their art. Some of the major global marketplaces include: OpenSea, Nifty Gateway, SuperRare, Known Origin, and Foundation. These marketplaces vary by traffic, exclusivity, and what kinds of digital assets they sell. NFT artists also have the option to create their own marketplace to sell their art. NFT.Kred gives creators the option to create and distribute their NFTs in a dedicated experience.

What is an NFT?

Non-fungible basically means that something is one-of-a-kind and can’t be covered by anything similar. A bitcoin, for example, is fungible, meaning you can exchange one for another and get exactly the same thing.

What is Crypto art?

CryptoArt, or NFT art, refers to exclusive digital artworks that can be thought of as digital trading cards. Rather than cards, they are tradable tokens that are linked to exclusive and unique tokens on the blockchain. The crypto art theory is focused on digital scarcity, which encourages you to purchase, sell, and exchange digital goods much like physical goods. CryptoKitties and Cryptopunks are two examples.