Artists using blockchain and NFTs to keep their work unique (and valuable)

Nevertheless, in April, the Dutch brand Moooi had succeeded in producing Reisinger’s “impossible” (called by the designer) Hortensia chair, its hyper-real form digitally rendered transformed into a physical chair covered with 30,000 petals of pink polyester. However, even Moooi, a company renowned for its aesthetics and advanced manufacturing ability, couldn’t do the same for Reisinger’s vision of a weeping sofa or serpentine chrome shelving.

“The NFT space is filled with tropes and tricks, really clichés,” says Australian digital artist and designer Jonathan Zawada. “Astronauts, moons, chrome bodies. There are a million and one 3D tools that you can get off the shelf to create digital works of art. NFTs are just one way to secure design, whether good or bad.

Zawada’s designs are really very good. In addition to designing the lighting of the Opera sails for the Vivid Sydney 2018 festival, he created videos and covers for musicians such as The Avalanches – “featuring”, he laughs, “a moon!” – and Flume. He started minting NFTs from material taken from them just as Reisinger’s work was going to be auctioned.

“I had started to receive DM [direct messages] people at the end of 2020 saying how this new technology could be good for me and my job, ”he recalls. “And when it exploded in February, it became clear very quickly that, aside from the potential benefits, the biggest impact was going to be how the technology nurtured a sense of community.”

On the other hand, the NFTs he hit for The Avalanches and Flume “got a lot of criticism” from fans who thought musicians should make albums, not NFTs.

“They saw DTV as a stupid ego badge for the rich,” Zawada explains, noting that “we invented the Internet as a way to make information completely free. And it only took us 20 years to figure out how to create scarcity in order to inflate perceived value. “

Reisinger, who believes that the NFT’s frenzy is in part due to the fact that wealthy collectors cannot make it to art fairs because of COVID-19, believes that “we are on the threshold of a new era in which art and culture are freed from space and time. constraints and rewritten rules of experience ”.

Moooi is available in Australia through Space Furniture.

The July issue of AFR Magazine – plus the Travel Special – releases Friday, June 25 inside The Australian Financial Review. Follow AFR Mag on Twitter and Instagram.