Art trumps money. Always. It is of import to recall this amidst 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 manufacture growing and markets becoming more liquid, crypto art has seen a flurry of incredible master market sales. The ICO-like fear of missing out has inspired collectors and artists to chase scarcity, and fifty-fifty destroy art in the process, equally was the case with the creation and auction of the Banksy print NFT.

Still, what may seem like a marketing ploy may be 1 of the greatest actionist performances the art globe has seen to date.

Chasing scarcity

The rarer something is, the more than information technology is coveted. That seems to exist the basic principle of whatsoever collectible items and applies to crypto art as well. A quick look at single vs. multiple-edition sales shows that the market favors uniqueness.

This chase for scarcity has taken on many forms, from limiting the number of editions of a particular art slice to finding "firsts" in a sea of things — as was the case with Jack Dorsey's tweet.

Major stars from the art world and music industry accept started to experiment with NFTs, making six-effigy drops a seemingly commonplace occurrence. From Paris Hilton'south $17,000 moving-picture show of a cat to Crud's $389,000 Death of the Old to Beeple'due south landmark Christie's sale, sales and sensation are on the rise.

The allure of mega sales

Despite the incredible chief market place sales, the secondary market, for the well-nigh part, has been relatively tranquility. Looking at data from SuperRare, nosotros can meet that secondary marketplace sales counts are a fraction of the number of primary items sold.

The fact that artists' royalties are dealt with differently on dissimilar platforms and rarely part cross-platform farther forces both creators and collectors to focus on initial sales for near-term success.

Bridging the gap

The blockchain manufacture has seen and continues to run into many attempts to bridge the physical and digital worlds. With respect to fine art, the initial attempts were focused on tokenization of concrete art and pieces by famous painters, with toll tags that fabricated them highly illiquid. The hope was that fractionalizing the expensive pieces through tokenization would pb to greater engagement from people who were previously priced out of the high-end art market. This would make the paintings more liquid investment vehicles.

To this indicate, the attempts have had very limited success. This may be due in office to the mismatch in audiences: Traditional collectors don't operate crypto wallets, and digital natives feel less attached to physical items held by a centralized party.

However, what if someone could take a physical art piece and make it digital? The Injective Protocol team has tried to do only that. It acquired a Banksy screenprint "Morons (White)," only to burn the physical artwork (while streaming the result) and minting the epitome equally an NFT.

The seemingly barbaric ritual was supposed to ascend the Banksy screen print to a blockchain and earn the team a tidy sum in the process. The 2nd goal was clearly achieved. The original piece was acquired for $95,000 and auctioned off on OpenSea for around $400,000. Even so, it can be argued that what happened was a transfer from the physical to the digital world.

Rather, the Injective Protocol squad destroyed a Banksy screenprint and created an entirely unlike work of art.

Vandals or actionists?

It is easy to write off the called-for of the Banksy NFT as a successful marketing ploy, just on closer inspection, at that place is so much more there.

On the surface, there is a tip of the lid to the original artist, who himself has destroyed his ain slice at an auction for the sake of creating new art. Yet, that is just the beginning.

Consider that art has a rich tradition of actionist events where an art installation was damaged for the sake of a statement, effectively creating a new piece of art. The well-nigh comparable example is probably that of Alexander Brener, who painted a green dollar sign on Kazimir Malevich's white cantankerous at a museum exhibition.

Brener was making a statement against "abuse and commercialism in the art earth." Now expect closer at the Banksy screenprint and read what it says: "I can't believe you morons actually buy this shit." That cannot be an accident.

At a time when a Beeple work sold for $6.6 meg, while a Vincent van Gogh (albeit a disputed van Gogh) went for $650,000, the Injective Protocol team made a argument by burning this particular Banksy piece and selling the NFT, which no longer represents a physical artwork but the memory of that artwork, at an auction.

To top it all off, the team streamed the burning of the piece... in truthful performance art fashion.

Did the market miss the point?

While the market place has been debating whether the claim of the destruction of fine art, the nature of scarcity and the price mechanics of crypto art, the Injective Protocol team may have pulled off 1 of the most spectacular actionist fine art statements in history.

This was a functioning art piece, a vandalistic ritual and an ironic auction all in 1.

The marketplace may be chasing scarcity for the sake of scarcity, without fifty-fifty pausing to consider what only happened. Information technology may even be that the Injective Protocol team did non intend for all of the hidden meanings to be there. However, that is the ability of art.

Years from now, subsequently the FOMOs and FUDs settle their scores, we volition be looking at this not as another 6-figure NFT auction, only as maybe the first example of actionist art in the crypto space.

The views, thoughts and opinions expressed hither are the writer'southward lonely and practice not necessarily reflect or correspond the views and opinions of Cointelegraph.

Ilya Abugov is an experienced analyst with a background in equity analytics, international management consulting and IT. He incorporates his traditional industry feel in his approach to data analysis and projection evaluation. Ilya is the former caput of research at Crypto Briefing and is an advisor at DappRadar. He is especially interested in the DeFi, art and collectibles sectors of the crypto industry.