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(8) Claire

In 2017, post-00s female artist “Claire” and cryptography expert “Mr. 703” met online by chance. Claire is the screen name, and so is Mr. 703.

But they both share a belief that crypto art must have a bright future. At that time, Mr. 703 gave Claire three Cryptopunks, and made Claire swear that no matter how valuable these three avatars are in the future, she will not sell them. Because this kind of art should be in the Museum of Modern Art in New York. . .

Why is Mr. 703 so generous, giving such a big gift to a girl he has never met before? Because, Mr. 703 is the one we mentioned earlier, who bought 758 Cryptopunks avatars. After that, he even sold them with gifts, and distributed 55 avatars (including the three for Claire), and there were 703 left, so he called himself “Mr. 703”.

But Claire clearly doesn’t have as much conviction as Mr. 703. In 2018, seeing that the value of all NFTs had dropped by 90%, Claire looked in the mirror, and she was still the frail artist suffering from depression, and she didn’t even know where the money for the next meal would be.

She quit various NFT groups, stopped talking to “Mr. 703”, bought a second-hand iPad, and spent $10 on a drawing software, started doing some graffiti, and tried to make some money. She was so busy making a living that she didn’t have time to look back.

Under the unseen ashes, new shoots are quietly growing.

If you turn the camera forward, in 2017, when Claire and Mr. 703 met, a website called OpenSea was quietly established. Its founders are Alex Attala and Devin Finzer.

Alex Attala and Devin Finzer

Unlike those code heroes who work alone, OpenSea began to raise financing at the beginning of its establishment and grew in the way of a formal company.

In 2018, OpenSea received a $120K investment from Y Combinator, an accelerator owned by Paul Graham, the godfather of technology entrepreneurship. Relying on the power of capital, he gritted his teeth and survived the cold winter.

Paul Graham, who is also the author of the famous book Hackers and Painters.

In 2021, the quadrennial craze in the crypto world is making a comeback. OpenSea has raised $1 billion in financing and instantly grew from a bud to a towering tree.

This time, the NFT world no longer has to look at the faces of the local tyrants in auction houses and galleries, they have their own native NFT trading market. The Cryptopunks have naturally become popular on OpnSea.

It wasn’t until this time that the down-and-out Claire remembered that she still had 3 NFTs in her hand. She chose her favorite #1629, the girl with pink hair, and replaced it to be her Twitter PFP.

With this PFP alone, her Twitter gained 1,000 followers a month. The influx of fans brings not only popularity, but also real purchasing power.

Claire put her work on OpenSea for sale, and someone actually placed an order, sold several paintings, and earned more than $6,000 worth of ETH. One of the buyers was Mr. 703.

A photographer named Justin Aversano reached out to Claire and asked if she could borrow head #1629, which he had the chance to put on an electronic display board on the streets of New York. Claire quickly agreed.

Justin Aversano

In May 2021, #1629 did appear on a digital screen near the New York Museum of Art.

Mr. 703’s prediction seems to have come true — although it has not been placed in the Museum of Modern Art, it is three blocks away. . .

Claire felt her heart pounding, and she wanted to see it with her own eyes.

It took three days and three nights to drive from her small town to New York. She tucked a mattress into her back seat and started the car. At night, she parked her car in a Wal-Mart parking lot, slept in it, went to the Wal-Mart in the morning to go to the toilet, and then drove again.

In this way, on June 5, 2021, she finally came to this dizzying international metropolis.

She parked the car and walked quickly to the tall electronic screen. The pixel girl with pink hair and a black hat sat quietly behind the screen, squinting at the world without saying a word.

It’s fucking punk.

Claire pulled out a piece of soft paper from her bag, wrote her name, and solemnly drew a small flower beside her, exactly the same as the flower behind her Twitter name, held it up in front of her, and took a picture with her phone photo.

She posted the picture on Twitter, accompanied by a sentence: It was worth it after sleeping in the car for several days to get here.

In the surprise and blessings of Twitter netizens, she made a detour to the coast of Connecticut, where is rich in seafood, , and gave herself a sumptuous lobster roll.

But Claire didn’t keep her promise to Mr. 703.

In the summer of 2021, her mother was hospitalized and required surgery. In order to accompany her mom, she wanted to rent a room near the hospital, so she sold two Cryptopunks NFTs, one for $68,000, and the other for $18,000. All she has left is #1629.

After hesitating for a long time, she bought a pink wig. It’s hard to say whether #1629 became her or she became #1629.

NFTs are just an illusory picture. But in Claire’s life, this “illusory picture” accompanied her years in a strange way. In her peaceful life, she had her own heroic moments.

Nothing is more real than this.

Claire’s self-portrait

(9) Pak

One of the first people to claim Cryptopunks was a man named Erick Calderon.

He is a businessman and amateur artist.

After the NFT fire, he also founded his own NFT website ArtBlock.

Erick Calderon

His website is interesting, all the artists in it can’t paint the work themselves and have to use an automatic art generation technology like Cryptopunks. Therefore, the artwork on ArtBlock has an abstract style. Like the one below, called Ringers, from artist Dmitri Cherniak.

Ringers NFT (1000 pieces)

In 2021, a work generated by Ringers sold for $5.8 million. People call this painting “Goose”.

RINGS#879

Money no longer gave Dmitri any special feeling. In 2022, he decided to do something more performance art. Every day in January, he used Ringers to generate a piece and sent it to a random Ethereum wallet. Of course, it is very likely that the wallet is not used at all, or, even if it is used, its owner will not notice the pie falling from the sky. But Dmitry wanted to do just that, tweeting: “Look at it as a celebration of birth, life and death.”

In fact, this trick has been played by another person. Picasso once deliberately “forgot” his paintings on the bus. There are other star art projects on ArtBlock, like Ana Carreras’ Trossets.

Trossets (1000 pieces)

Like Ento’s Heavenly Bodies.

Heavenly Bodies ( 400 pieces)

Of course, the stars of this NFT movement, the two tech nerds of Larvae Labs, are more likely to be idle, and they have launched a new 3D-style NFT called Meebits.

Meebits

The 3D style actually shows their ambition to enter the metaverse. In the era of web pages, a person’s avatar is a picture, but in the metaverse, a person’s image is three-dimensional, with a head, a face, and buttocks, and a 360-degree movement without dead ends like a seven-dimensional space. Therefore, Cryptopunks are Pixels, and Meebits are Voxels. The two are in the same vein.

However, now, these stories can only be regarded as the prologue in the NFT world.

In any field, there will be a historical moment when a “pioneer” gives way to a “great god”. In this deep blue sea, real whales began to emerge slowly.

On March 11, 2021, Christie’s auction house sold an NFT, which is “Everydays: the First 5000 Days” by illustrator Beeple. Unlike other artworks generated by electronic algorithms, Beeple is considered a model worker. Since May 1st Labor Day in 2007, he has been insisting on painting one painting every day. By 2021, he has finally collected 5,000 works.

He put these 5,000 paintings together into one. The painting sold for $69.3 million.

Everydays: the First 5000 days

This number properly broke the historical record for the most expensive work in NFT history. Moreover, since it is said to be “the first 5000 days”, there must be “the middle 5000 days” and “the last 5000 days” and so on, which is probably around 2035.

But what’s really crazy is that the record set by Beeple didn’t even hold for a year. On December 2, 2021, a mysterious corner of the Internet started a 48-hour sale.

The thing they sell is called mass. During these 48 hours, you can buy as much as you want, but after the deadline, there is only so much mass in the world. And according to the amount of mass each person has, the system on the blockchain will generate a piece of material for you in real time, which is your NFT.

The more mass, the bigger your substance.

The interesting gameplay is that mass can be traded. If you have 10 mass, I have 20, and I buy yours, I have 30, and at the same time, my NFT gets bigger.

Second-hand ‘substance’ traded on OpenSea

As the mass is passed into the hands of different people, the matter in this space will start to move and collide. Just like our universe, no one can accurately predict how these stars will evolve and merge. It can be said that this is a dynamically changing NFT and performance art. The name of this art is The Merge — fusion.

In that auction, a total of 28,983 buyers bought the mass, with a total amount equivalent to $9,180.

This number is significant, not only because it once again set the highest price for an NFT, but also set another all-time record: the highest price for a living artist to publicly auction an artwork.

The previous record was $91.1 million, set in 2019 by Jeff Koons’ 1986 sculpture “The Rabbit.”

Jeff Koons and his work Rabbit

It’s like a declaration:

The Everest of digital art has surpassed physical art.

What’s more interesting is that the artist named Pak behind The Merge, no one knows his real name, appearance, male or female. No one even knew whether he was a person or an organization.

But his creativity is recognized. (Let’s just assume it’s “him”)

As early as March 2021, the fledgling Pak was noticed by Sotheby’s auction house, and his two works “The Pixel” and “The Switch” were sold for $1.36M and $1.4M respectively. .

This isn’t a picture that didn’t load, it’s The Pixel.

On September 30, 2021, he developed the first social experiment game “The Lost Poet”.

In the game, 65,536 AI-generated poet portraits sold for a total of $70 million.

Lost Poets

Back to The Merge. On December 4, 2021, Pak announced the launch of a mysterious website — mass.black.

The site currently has only one front page, and behind it apparently hides a deeper level of The Merge gameplay that Pak has not revealed. From here, that auction appears to be just the beginning of a larger project.

As a result, Pak gradually became a god, and he was called “Satoshi Nakamoto in the NFT world”.

Pak has 370K followers on Twitter. In a way, these people’s attention is not blind, because as Pak said,

he wants to prove that NFTs are far from a jpeg picture.

This is a list of the 10 most expensive works in the NFT world as of February 2022. (click to see larger image)

At least, The Merge has proved that NFTs can rely on program, code and philosophical design to create wider possibilities than traditional art, and reach the soul point that traditional art cannot reach. At the bottom of the NFT website NiftyGateway where The Merge has landed, there is this sentence:

We won’t stop until 1 billion people collect NFTs.

(10) The rebels

Many people fiercely question whether NFTs are art at all.

Just like when people questioned whether Andy Warhol’s cans were art.

The reason of the doubters is that these works do not have the traditional sense of “beauty”.

But please note that the highest peak of human art is never achieved by pure “beauty”, but by the critical and questioning spirit carried by them.

The reason why “Mona Lisa” is bright is because she defied the millennium darkness of the Middle Ages with a pair of gentle eyes that belonged to human beings.

The reason why “Starry Night” is eternal is because the blossoming branches reach the back of the sky. It is a soul holding a paintbrush, trying to gather the courage to break through the suffering.

When art begins to flatter power, it ceases to be art.

From this point of view, even though the frog Pepe is small and the cypherpunk are simple, they observe the times in a distributed way and try to interact with the times.

When they are unhappy, they will also raise the middle finger to the times without hesitation — a distributed, untraceable middle finger protected by technology.

Even if people are like ants, everyone has the urge to respond to the times to prove that we have lived enthusiastically or decadently.

Every joke you tell, every expression you make is a testimony of your life. Everyone wants their life proof to be different, like the one that stands out from the side-by-side cans.

Therefore, with the help of codes, people have separated small universes. In these universes, dreams are priced in the form of NFTs, and you can pick them up.

At least in our own small universe, you and I have the opportunity to have a 15-minute heroic dream.

I am afraid this is an era when machines are piled up like mountains and codes are surging, and the best thing can be given to its people.

The end

This article is translated from《NFT精神史：罐头、青蛙和平凡人的15分钟英雄梦想》written by a Chinese tech journalist Max Shi ZHONG and published on Qianhei.net. I translated it to pay my tribute to the author, it’s a legendary piece about NFT, even could be recorded in a history book. It is quite long, but 10000% worth reading it.