Picture: EFE / Jason Szenes
The New York 'Superchief Gallery' this Thursday became the first physical gallery in the world to dedicate itself to the exhibition of works in NFT, a new digital art format that has reached stratospheric popularity in recent months.
"Since we opened our first digital art gallery in Soho in 2016, 'Superchief' has relied on native-digital art as an essential art form that must be included in the art movement of our era," said the co-founder of 'Superchief Gallery', Ed Zipco in a statement.
Zipco also noted that they have known for years that there is no way to monetize digital art, but they were hopeful that it would become part of the wider art community in the future.
In this first art show on NFT, titled 'Season One Starter Pack', the gallery will show the works of 300 artists that will rotate daily and will be displayed on high resolution 4K screens.
Among the pieces stands out 'Mask Splitting' by the American Swoon, real name Caledonia Curry, who is known for being the first artist of the Street Art movement to achieve fame, and 'NFTesla', by Moscow's Alexei Mashkow.
NFTs are digital assets that thanks to blockchain technology are registered as unique, irreplaceable, and whose transaction history can be followed during the origin of the work.
This application of the blockchain has been a revolution in digital art since a creator can register his work as unique and a buyer of it can certify both its authenticity and ownership of the work.
NFTs open the door to an infinity of applications in the creation, exchange, and transfer of unique digital content and collection assets worldwide with a relatively low cost (minting works and closing transactions in blockchain has a variable computational cost and in emissions).
Also, NFT it's being so popular recently that the technology columnist for The New York Times newspaper Kevin Roose sold his column on Thursday in which he deals with the phenomenon of NFTs (non-fungible token or cryptographic tokens) on an NFT platform for $ 563,400. The bid for his column published on Wednesday was closed this Thursday at 350 units of the cryptocurrency Ethereum, which is equivalent to the current exchange rate of more than half a million dollars.
The New York Times is not the first to sell an NFT digital collectible. The Associated Press news agency auctioned for $ 180,000 a digital work that showed the electoral map of last November's elections in the United States.
Also, on March 11, Christie's auction for the first time an entirely digital work of art, 'Every day's: The First 5000 Days' by the artist Beeple, which broke all records by reaching 69 million dollars.