The Top 5 NFT Artists Out There!
NFT artists have become a serious phenomenon over the past several years. However, with the advance of cryptocurrency, these digital artworks have achieved new heights of importance in the worlds of both bitcoin and professional fine art. Some of these artworks have even sold for tens of millions of dollars.
Below you’ll find a list of five of the most famous NFT artists on the market. By creating digital artworks that sell on auction for millions, these artists legitimize an art form that only recently hit the mainstream.
What Is an NFT Artist?
NFT stands for Non-Fungible Token and is the digital equivalent of a giclee original artist’s print in the fine art world. In broader terms, NFTs are any kind of product that exists solely in the digital world but is still exchanged for currency in the real world. NFTs can include everything from digital artworks to articles, music, or memes. (Source: 99 Designs)
Along with providing a means for monetizing digital products, NFT art is beneficial for digital artists because it provides a way for them to safely sell their products and have those products maintain artistic value without having to worry about the images being reproduced digitally.
NFT artworks are usually bought and sold exclusively over the Internet. To sell NFTs, digital artists create a digital wallet, then exchange their NFTs for digital currency. Increasingly, NFTs are sold using bitcoin or other types of cryptocurrency.
At the end of the day, most NFT art is sold as a way for fine art collectors to “collect” digital artworks and still have those artworks maintain their monetary value. After all, free copies of digital artwork are easily taken off the Internet for casual use by anyone. NFTs just provide a formalized market for digital art to be sold.
Are NFT Artists Traditional Artists?
Many NFT artists are multimedia artists who put together both digital and traditional artworks. Some, such as Trevor Jones, specialize in hybridizing traditional media such as oil painting and contemporary “cyberpunk” media such as augmented reality or QR scanning.
Some NFT artists are exclusively digital. This is usually the case with NFT artists that specialize in generating large amounts of “drops” or everyday NFT content. However, many NFT artists straddle the line between digital and traditional artwork in order to monetize both forms of their artistic output.
Are NFT Artworks Collector's Items?
Even though you may hear for some NFT artworks going for thousands or even millions of dollars, this isn’t representative of the NFT art world at large.
Most of the NFT tokens or artworks you can purchase on blockchain from less famous NFT artists are intended to serve as the digital equivalent of trading cards rather than collector’s items worth large amounts of money.
A similar example to NFT tokens is the purchase of miniature art prints on artisan websites such as Etsy, or digital cosmetics sold as microtransactions in video games. While not as valuable as the original print, these tokenized versions of the artwork are a fun way for casual art collectors to amass a digital collection. (Source: The Verge)
What Does an NFT Artist Do?
NFT artists create digital art and sell part of the ownership of the art digitally. Unlike regular digital artworks, NFTs are protected and authenticated through blockchain technology. An NFT artist is a digital artist who takes advantage of this blockchain tech to protect their artworks against reproduction.
Here are some of the blockchain technologies used by NFT artists to authenticate their artwork:
- Ethereum: Ethereum is the most popular form of blockchain technology used by NFT artists. This open-source blockchain runs on thousands of decentralized platforms.
- Tezos: Tezos is a type of cryptocurrency designed for peer-to-peer interactions and is a popular crypto platform for setting up digital contracts.
- Cosmos: Billing itself as the “Internet of blockchains,” Cosmos is geared to become its own bitcoin ecosystem in a decentralized economic future. Cosmos uses Inter-Blockchain Communication protocols to secure transactions.
- Polkadot: Polkadot is an open-source blockchain platform that allows interconnected blockchains to be built on it. These interconnected blockchains are known as
- Binance Smart Chain: Like Polkadot, Binance Smart Chain functions as a blockchain platform to run business transactions based on smart contracts. Binance Smart Chain is known for its capacity to facilitate high transactions.
No matter which blockchain technology they use, NFT artists are able to convert their digital artworks into authenticated digital currency. This allows artists to secure their work and also creates a unique niche market where they can safely exchange their products.
Is NFT Artwork Valuable?
Even though a large portion of the artwork created as NFTs so far has been relatively grotesque and overly saturated with Internet memes, the main value in NFT art is in its potential as a way to authenticate the transaction of digital products.
Fine artists are just now getting on board the NFT train, so investors can expect to see more thought-provoking artwork hit the blockchain as the technology continues to progress.
Who Are the Top NFT Artists?
NFT art may be the newest buzz in the art world, but only a few NFT artists have risen above the pack to take Christie’s and other fine art auction houses by storm. Here are some of the most famous NFT artists in the world.
The Top 5 NFT Artists Out There!
Beeple
Of the famous NFT artists in the world, none is as famous as Beeple, also known as Mike Winkelmann. This South Carolina artist specializes in absurdist and dreamlike art that makes a fierce commentary on current events using such celebrity figures as Kim Jong Il and Donald Trump.
Beeple is not just famous for the quality of his digital artwork. This NFT artist is counted as one of the three most valuable living artists in the modern world, and his highest-valued NFT artwork sold for over sixty-nine million dollars. Despite this fame and renown, Beeple takes an irreverent attitude towards his artwork, referring to the majority of it as “crap.”
Along with his NFT artworks, Beeple also generates short films and Creative Common VJ loops. His most popular artwork, Everydays: The First 5,000 Days, is a massive collage of every digital artwork the artist created for five thousand days. This artwork ultimately sold for 69.4 million dollars and became the first pure NFT ever traded at Christie’s.
Trevor Jones
Trevor Jones is a traditional painter who recently began using crypto, animation, and augmented reality applications to enhance his visual works. Based out of Scotland, Jones’ process is generally to paint a traditional painting, and then animate it after the fact.
A remarkable fact about the popularity of Trevor Jones as an NFT artist is that this artist is practically fresh out of art school. Trevor Jones graduated from the Edinburgh College of Art and immediately set to work turning the art world upside-down.
A major contribution of Trevor Jones to the NFT art world is the introduction of QR scanning codes into physical media. Not long after that in 2012, he became one of the first artists in the world to integrate augmented reality into a traditional oil painting.
While not quite as valuable as Beeple, Trevor Jones is still one of the most valuable NFT artists in the world. His most famous work, The Bitcoin Bull, sold for over fifty-five million dollars. His current project up for auction is an augmented reality painting known as EthBoy that is designed to change in accordance with Ethereums performance on the world market.
Mad Dog Jones
Mad Dog Jones isn’t just one of the top NFT artists in the world – he’s the top-selling visual artist in Canada, period. Mad Dog’s real name is Michah Dowbak, and his NFT artwork REPLICATOR sold for the eye-watering amount of $4.1 million dollars to a mysterious buyer at the Philips auction house. This is also the most money a Canadian artwork has ever sold for at auction.
As for the themes of his work, Mad Dog Jones tackles the cyberpunk and dystopian motifs that have permeated much of NFT’s initial art movement. Many of Jones’ artworks feature imagery from metropolitan cities, natural phenomena, and otherworldly alternate realities.
REPLICATOR is famous in the NFT art world for its ability to create new NFTs or “jams” off the existing NFT blockchain. If the owner of REPLICATOR sells the ownership rights to the piece, they also sell off the rights to any of the replicant artworks that the NFT program creates. (Source: ArtNet)
3LAU
NFT art isn’t just about tokenized digital artwork. 3LAU (pronounced “Blau”) is an avant-garde DJ who has shown that NFT transactions can be just as influential in the musical world.By selling the world’s first-ever crypto-albums, 3LAU managed to make over eleven million dollars in a single day. (Source: Business Insider)
3LAU used an NFT auction to sell off tokenized versions of his music, but he also used it to monetize a variety of experiences as well as products, from unreleased music to special edition vinyl albums.
The adoption of cryptocurrency by musicians is seen as a positive impact on the music world since it allows musicians to take back some power over their rights as creators (though it is also seen as a sort of death knell for traditional music marketing practices and big record labels).
By allowing musicians to continue to profit off their creations even after selling their work, NFT transactions allow musicians to develop a passive stream of income off their past works and also maintain authenticated control of their creative works at the same time.
XCOPY
XCOPY is a London-based artist who has been a part of the cryptocurrency conversation since its very beginnings. XCOPY is seen as a leader in the crypto-art community and regularly interacts with the community on SuperRare and other crypto-art platforms.
Like many examples of crypto-art, much of XCOPY’s work focuses on themes of dystopia, darkness, and apathy. XCOPY’s work also features visual loops that are often animated or distorted.
Unlike newer NFT artists, one of the things that makes XCOPY’s NFT artwork so valuable relative to other digital artists is its longevity. As one of the early adopters of crypto-art, XCOPY’s work has been around long enough to derive value from its age as well as its themes.
NFT Art Is the Cutting Edge of Art Collection
While NFT artwork might seem obscure to someone who hasn’t had their ear to the ground in either cryptocurrency or fine art circles, this form of authenticated blockchain artwork is gaining immense popularity among digital artists who otherwise find it difficult to monetize their products. NFTs are uniquely poised to become the newest form of stable cryptocurrency.
