By Lucie-Éléonore Riveron, President of FauveParis
This is a cry from the heart: you don’t have to understand NFT, you just have to feel it!
An NFT is simply a technological tool for giving value to WORKS OF ART designed by and for screens (an NFT can be used for many other things, but that’s not the point).
Buying and selling a painting or sculpture?
It’s very easy: you like it, you buy it, you own it, you have it at home.
For a video animation or a digital collage, it’s more difficult: you like it, you buy it, but the digital work continues to be distributed on the web. NFT (based on the revolutionary blockchain technology) allows you to become the sole owner, without preventing distribution.
That’s all there is to it.
Of course, blockchain and NFT cover many related fields: crypto-currencies, collections of pixelated animals (not always very pretty), videos, accessories for metaverses…But here I’m talking about art. Creative. Works. Artists. Of collectors. NFT is just a means, and since you don’t need to understand how the internet works to use and enjoy it on a daily basis, there’s no need to learn more about blockchain and NFT at this stage.
So get rid of your preconceptions, put aside the sultry headlines and let yourself be surprised. You won’t like everything, of course, but do you like all painters, from all eras, in all styles?
Discover the neo-classical reinterpretations of art history 3.0 by Léo Caillard or Stephan Breuer, the impertinent remarks of Albertine Meunier, the infinite poetry of Hermine Bourdin, Réphaël Erba, Clément Morin, Roger Kilimanjaro or Tom Fabia, the spellbinding 3D animations of Agoria, Benjamin Bardou, Brendan Dawes or Samy La Crapule. Dive into neo-pop with PosterLad, Xerak, Benjamin Spark, Yacine Ait Kaci, Louis16art, Teto or the splendid black-and-white compositions of Urbandrone, Tim Maxwell or Julien Gachadoat.
Discover the most important artists in the young history of crypto-art, who are breaking new sales records every day: Pak, Beeple, Hackatao, XCopy, Fewocious, Miss Al Simpson, Pascal Boyart. Learn that today’s code and artificial intelligence are the pigments and chisels of yesteryear: works by Obvious, Abdoulaye Barry and CharlesAi.eth are examples of this disconcerting beauty.
Enjoy the voxel (3D pixel) research of Denis Santelli or the young Kibo, the elegant non-figurative universe of Margaux Klein, the political videos of Rekt.News or the quirky and fundamentally communitarian universe of the “profile picture” collections of Clone-X, Meebits or Avastars. Clone-X, Meebits or Avastars.
Let’s be proud of our French scene, of which you’ll find a wide selection in this sale.
This was not easy to organize. Legally, first of all, because the timing is not ideal, between an article of the Commercial Code still in force that does not explicitly authorize the auction of intangible goods (which is why all the lots in the sale are paper prints, to which NFTs are simply attached) and a law opening up this possibility passed a few days ago by Parliament, promulgated on the day I am writing these lines but with no implementing decree as yet.
Then, technically speaking, because by definition, everything is new, from the exhibition of the digital works – of different format, duration and sound – to their display on our site.
And finally, philosophically: what position should we adopt as an intermediary (which, moreover, usually guarantees the confidentiality of the parties involved) in a universe – that of the blockchain – that is de-mediatized and totally transparent?
Today, I’m convinced that our role as an auction house is to accompany this revolution in digital art and crypto art enabled by NFT. It’s our duty to build bridges by helping collectors of contemporary art to apprehend the art of screens, to make their task easier, to reassure them through our ethical obligations and the procedures they are familiar with, to support the creation of wallets, the display of their purchases on screens, large or small, to be placed in their living rooms – and why not?
But it’s also up to us to make crypto artists part of the great history of art, the one validated by time and the market, whether we like it or not. Having a quotation is a form of recognition for artists, and only public sales can create it. It’s not easy for artists who are used to selling on their own on NFT sales platforms to come face to face with the “IRL” (in real life) market, but this is a challenge and should enable them to reach other types of buyers.
Once again, I don’t think there are any NFT artists or NFT collectors. The worlds are not parallel, they are porous and need to inspire and respond to each other. I’d like to be able to sell NFTs of crypto art in the same way and at the same time as a work by Pierre Soulages or a piece of furniture by Charlotte Perriand. Auctions are a spectacle, an unforgettable and incomparable way of buying, a way of falling in love, hic et nunc, a bidding war and envy at all costs. A show in the service of artworks, artists, collectors and collectresses.
It’s a challenge we’ll take up together!
WAGMI 😉