Mainstream adoption of nonfungible tokens doesn’t seem to be slowing down anytime soon as the first-ever art gallery dedicated solely to NFT-backed art has opened in New York City. Superchief, an artist collective that operates galleries in New York and Los Angeles, announced the launch of the new gallery in the Union Square neighborhood. The gallery will display NFTs via a collaboration with Blackdove, a manufacturer of high-resolution digital art display screens. The first exhibition, titled “Season One Starter Pack” (possibly a nod to the video game/digitial art cultural crossover) casts a wide net, featuring over 300 artists. Each of …

Russia’s State Hermitage Museum, the second-largest art museum in the world, is preparing to host a digital art exhibition involving non-fungible tokens. Scheduled to take place in 2021, the Hermitage’s NFT project will be Russia’s first exhibition in the field of NFT art, the museum officially announced Thursday. The Hermitage’s contemporary art department is organizing the exhibition, which will be part of its “Hermitage 20/21” project. The announcement read: “Non-fungible tokens have become a new form of securing rights to an artwork using blockchain technology, which allows you to establish unambiguous control over copyright and ownership rights.” The Aksenov Family …

A new decentralized NFT platform is vowing to give back power and autonomy to photographers — enabling them to prove ownership of their work and avoid the hefty commissions that are charged by major online marketplaces. The team behind Unique.Photo says the site has been built in response to the challenging environment that experienced photographers face. Copyright infringement is a widespread issue, and the proliferation of third-party platforms has made it increasingly difficult for professionals to secure and control their income. Launching in May 2021, the permissionless marketplace is the next milestone in the creation of an ecosystem that is …

Art trumps money. Always. It is important to remember this amid the current crypto art hype. Nonfungible tokens have given digital art the benefit of provable ownership, scarcity and programmability, allowing digital creators to promote and sell their work in ways never before possible. With the blockchain industry growing and markets becoming more liquid, crypto art has seen a flurry of incredible primary market sales. The ICO-like fear of missing out has inspired collectors and artists to chase scarcity, and even destroy art in the process, as was the case with the creation and auction of the Banksy print NFT. …

An early 20th-century who boasts a permanent installation at the Museum of Modern Art is about to get new life on the blockchain. In collaboration with nonfungible marketplace Mintable, the family of Wladimir Baranoff-Rossine will be releasing a collection of the esteemed Cubo-Futurist’s work. There will be a number of paintings digitized as 1,000-print drops, three digitized NFT piece auctions and one hybrid NFT/physical painting auction set to be sent to the highest bidder: both a physical Baranoff-Rossine original painting and an NFT image of the work. On crypto market data provider Brave New Coin’s podcast, Mintable CEO Zack Burks …

The mysterious buyer of the world’s most expensive non-fungible token “Everydays: The First 5000 Days” by Beeple, has revealed their identity. Metapurse, a global NFT fund whose founder successfully bid and acquired the piece in a Christie’s auction for $69.3 million in early March, penned a blog post Thursday, disclosing the real names and stories of key figures behind the project. According to the announcement, Vignesh Sundaresan is the real name of MetaKovan, the pseudonymous founder of Metapurse and the buyer of the Beeple’s $69 million NFT. Before founding Metapurse, Sundaresan had been actively involved in the crypto industry since …

The latest celebrity to suddenly realize the immense artistic significance of tokenized art (or 'cash in on' depending on your perspective) is rapper and Fyre Festival co-founder Ja Rule — who is auctioning off a 48-inch-by-60-inch, oil-painting of the Fyre Fest's corporate logo with accompanying NFT. The auction, which has a reserve price of $600,000 kicks off today on Flipkick. The Fyre Festival was a much-hyped 2017 luxury festival in the Bahamas featuring $100,000 ticket packages that turned into a legendary disaster. Co-founder Billy McFarland landed in prison for six years over a $28 million fraud, but Ja Rule was …

In a whirlwind seven-day period, which began with Twitter founder Jack Dorsey proving that almost anything can be tokenized — even his old tweets — and culminated on Thursday with a Christie’s art auction that brought a mind-boggling $69.3 million bid for a tokenized Beeple work — fetching more at an auction than pieces by George Seurat, Paul Gaugain or Salvador Dalí — some observers were asking: Are nonfungible tokens spiraling out of control? Even before the storied auction house catapulted artist Mike Winkelmann, aka Beeple, into the rarified company of Jeff Coons and David Hockney — i.e., living artists …

As the profusion of new algorithmically-generated nonfungible token projects drives down the premium on digital rarity, digital history and being among the “firsts” has become a more reliable source of value. As a result, long-forgotten projects are being unearthed by on-chain sleuths, and yesterday they might have struck gold on their biggest find yet. At 7 AM UTC March 12, Twitter user and NFT collector “ETHoard” posted a short thread on what may be the second-ever nonfungible collectibles project launched on Ethereum, MoonCats. While maybe not as eye pleasing as the recent #CryptoCats discovery, after that rush happened I started …

You might not know his name, but you've probably seen his work. For years Alberto Mielgo has been producing digital art for movies, television, and commercials. Notable works include an episode of Netflix’s LOVE DEATH AND ROBOTS (for which he and his 70-plus man team won multiple Emmys), music videos for The Gorillaz, and Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, where he collaborated with NFT digital-art-turn-high art sensation Beeple. Given the success of his former colleague and the lofty prices NFTs are routinely fetching, Mielgo could well be the next commercially popular digital artist to use blockchain tech as means of both …

Digital artist Mike Winkelmann, also known as Beeple, has once again made NFT history after his latest piece, “Everydays: The First 5000 Days,” raised over $69 million on Christie’s auction house. “Everydays” was minted on Feb. 16 and put up for auction on Feb. 25 at a starting price of $100. The auction closed on Thursday. The final price tag puts Beeple in elite company as far as living artists go. Only two other living artists, Jeff Koons and David Hockney, have created more expensive works. As Cointelegraph previously reported, “Everydays” is comprised of 5,000 unique images produced each day …

Prominent online art portfolio platform ArtStation has caved in to pressure from artists and environmentally-conscious users hours after announcing a series of non-fungible token, or NFT, drops from several notable artists. On Mar. 9, the platform announced the program was scheduled to begin today and featured works from artists including Halo Infinite art director Nicolas “Sparth” Bouvier, retired NASA astronaut Nicole Stott, Assassin’s Creed franchise art director Raphael Lacoste, painter Craig Mullins, and Magic: The Gathering illustrator Alena Aenami. Following a furious bombardment of criticism, all mentions of the announcement were pulled down and replaced with a short message on …