The most expensive NFT until now is Everydays: The First 5000 Days by Beeple, originally named Mike Winkelmann, which is a collage of the past digital artworks he created every day. It was the first completely digital art that was bided by a major auction house and finally sold for $69 million in 2021. This sale made him the third most-valued artist after David Hockney and Jeff Koons, regarding auction prices. 

Although first appeared around 2014, the growth of the market for NFTs has been extremely rapid in recent years. In 2021, the whole NFT market was worth $41 billion in total, which is almost close to the total value of the entire global fine art market.

Therefore, as the NFT market booming and generating sales, many more artists are trying to take a step into it. But does every artist really need to be a part of the NFT world and does it really looks like the sweet sugar coat we see from the outside?

What makes an NFT art expensive?

Before we step into the situation and make the decisions, we should first understand the reason behind the phenomenon of NFTs’ prosperities. An article published on Beincrypto by Lulia Vasile pointed out 5 different aspects that make an NFT expensive:

• The reputation of the artist
• The community behind the NFT
• The status symbol that the NFT brings along
• Pop culture
• Technology used

The reputation of the artist:

It’s understandable for people to pursue art from famous artists as it was always like this in the history of the art market for collection and investment purposes. The reason Beeple’s work was selected by Christie’s and sold at this high value is also that he was already well-known with around 2.5 million followers in total on different social media platforms. It’s a lot easier for those artists who are already famous in the field, whether traditional artists or digital artists, to get attention on top of all other works in the sea among collectors if they want to sell their works as NFTs.

A few months ago, Takashi Murakami, the famous Japanese contemporary artist whose physical artworks have been sold worldwide for millions of dollars, announced that he will release a series of 108 NFT works on OpenSea based on his signature sunflower icon. There are already a total of 22.9K ETH amount of trade value within a month of the release. Some people even used bots to reserve the public slots because the artworks are so desirable in the market.

The community behind the NFT:

The NFT communities are often built around owners of NFTs from a specific collection. The more the number of people in the community, the more popular the NFT collection is. Cryptopunks, which are 10,000 unique collectible digital pop-art characters generated randomly by algorithm, is an example of becoming widely-spread thanks to its community members.

The status symbol that the NFT brings along:

As more celebrities come to the NFTs market, some NFTs are becoming symbols of status and popular trends. Thus, out of the mindset of chasing trends, more people would tend to buy those NFTs that have been purchased by celebrities, which makes those NFTs more similar to luxury goods from a psychological perspective.

Pop culture:

The fact that NFTs are embracing Pop art and becoming a kind of pop culture is inevitable. Sharing the common characteristics of Pop art including recognizable imagery, vibrant colors, innovative, and straight-forward, those NFTs that have iconic images and special characteristics are widely known by the public and thus the prices float to a higher level.

Technologies used:

Most NFTs rely on Ethereum blockchains for creations, data storage, and transactions. According to AZ Bigmedia, the components of NFT token metadata can include the artist or creator of the item, the description of the item, the price, the NFT creation date, the ownership of the item, specifications such as royalties, the transaction history of the asset, the new owner, and the location links of the file. There is also a “gas fee” for each transaction because Ethereum transactions need computational energy to perform. The gas fee varies for each sale based on the size of the digital work and the difficulty level of making the transaction. The estimated costs of NFT transactions based on average gas prices are listed below by NFT’s Street:

• Minting cost:  $40-$100 ($70 average) to produce a single ERC721 NFT
• Listing cost:   $10-$20 ($15 average)
• Auction cost: $40-$100 ($70 average)
• Destroying an NFT: $4-$10 ($7 average)

Advantages for artists to embrace NFTs

Admittedly, there are lots of advantages for artists to enter the NFT market and here are some of the most impactful ones.

• Branding: NFTs allow artists to preserve the digital footprints of their works and develop online images of themselves, which can be a good way for artists to enhance their names’ publicity and engage more audiences on the internet, especially on social media platforms.
• Traceability: It’s easier for artists to see where their artworks go and trace the art’s circulations by themselves in regards to NFTs. An NFT certificate has a unique blockchain-based identifier, which allows all the past transaction records about it to be retrieved directly from the ledger of the relevant tokenized asset.
• Resale value and sell-on fees: Based on the transparency and traceability of NFTs, artists can easily get a timely estimate of how much their works are worth in the market. Moreover, artists are supposed to get sell-on fees each time their arts are sold.
• Reach more audiences: NFTs give artists an opportunity to reach broader audiences around the world compared to physical artworks. It’s easier for their works to be seen by collectors and then sold online. Just like a black artist Niall Ashley said, “For marginalized groups, this can help further representation on a global scale.” In the video below, a Nigerian artist Abdulrahman Yusuf creating NFT artworks talked about how NFTs have changed both the art market in Africa and his life. An annual international art fair in Africa also collaborated with the digital marketplace to sell NFTs, which helped open the artists’ options and generate more opportunities to sell their works.

Bursting the dreamy bubbles surrounding NFTs

Although many have been saying that NFTs are empowering artists, especially those independent or emerging artists, to have more choices and make more money from the sales, some other statistics about the market might tell you a different story.

Often seeing the average sale prices on NFT transaction platforms and data collection websites such as Nonfungible.com, artist Kimberly Parker was skeptical about the extremely high value, and did an in-depth research on the medium price of NFT sales to find out if the averages are actually skewed and used to mistakenly represent the whole industry.

According to OpenSea, in 2021, the “average” price of an NFT sold on SuperRare is $5,800; the “average” price on MakersPlace is $2,400; and the “average” on Foundation is $3,500. However, these numbers might be skewed by large sales from those famous artists. Therefore, using the median number might be a more appropriate reference for artists who want to try NFTs.

From the graph above, we can see that most primary sales (the first sale of an NFT) prices fall into the range of $0 to $100, and more than 50% of all recorded sales were under $200. Thus, making money through NFTs is not that easy for most artists.

Another controversial issue surrounding NFTs is the artists’ rights and authorities.

NFTs were supposed to be invented to protect artists’ original works and give artists more control over their works, but it seems to go in the opposite direction. Most NFT platforms are using the same shortcut, so what people have bought is actually a link to the digital artwork, and it’s hard to tell if it’s still the original artwork many years later because the actual digital artwork couldn’t be storaged in a blockchain. According to Anil Dash, the CEO of Glitch, due to technical limits, records in most blockchains are too small to hold an entire image. Moreover, people are creating NFTs based on other artists’ works without their permission, which also hurts those artists’ rights.

In addition, there are still problems with data securities of NFT technologies and the Certificates of Authority in the digital world.

On April 4, 2021, a hacker hacked Beeple’s crypto wallet and minted a fake copy of his most expensive piece Everydays: The First 5,000 Days, the same one sold by Christie’s, on two different NFT marketplaces. Some NFT investors have also experienced the situation where their purchases simply disappeared, and there was no solution to recover the initial investment or the digital asset. Therefore, Daniel Cheung recommends having physical documentation for NFT sales until the technology is mature enough to protect the authorities and data.

Conclusion

Just like each new technology, NFT has its own advantages and disadvantages for people who use it, especially for artists and creators. For artists who want to join the NFT world, they must understand the mechanisms behind it and weigh their pays and returns before putting efforts into creating NFTs. And hopefully, there will be more regulations and the market could be more mature in the future, which might then actually help artists and the art world.

Bibliography

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Conti, Robyn & Schmidt, John. “What Is An NFT? Non-Fungible Tokens Explained.” Forbes. April 8, 2022. https://www.forbes.com/advisor/investing/cryptocurrency/nft-non-fungible-token/.

Dash, Anil. “NFTs Weren’t Supposed to End Like This.” The Atlantic. April 2, 2021. https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/04/nfts-werent-supposed-end-like/618488/.

Ellis, James. “Takashi Murakami Flower NFT collection: Everything We Know So Far.” NFT Evening. February 22, 2022. https://nftevening.com/takashi-murakami-flower-nft-everything-we-know-so-far/.

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Kinsella, Eileen. “Think Everyone is Getting Rich Off NFTs? Most Sales are Actually $200 or Less, according to One Report.” Artnet. April 29, 2021. https://news.artnet.com/market/think-artists-are-getting-rich-off-nfts-think-again-1962752.

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“Preserving cultural heritage isn’t something that is solely nice to have or nice to do, it’s sometimes imperative to the well-being of the world’s societies.”

– Brad Smith, the President of Microsoft

According to Poonam Gandhi, a professor at Flame University, culture and heritages shape human society and provide a sense of identity. Specifically, cultural heritages can stimulate tourism, which hence benefits the local economies, educate people with culture and history, and enhance social inclusiveness.

The importance of preserving cultural heritage is obvious, meanwhile, people are facing difficulties in the preservation process. So, what can AI and other modern technologies actually do in the process of preserving cultural heritages that makes Microsoft and other organizations invest in them?

Antiques Restoration

Due to natural disasters or man-made damages during the war, lots of precious historical heritages had been broken into pieces. Considering the time and cost efficiency, plus the difficulty of lacking pieces of evidence of their original looks, it’s very difficult to repair those historical artifacts and might need the efforts of several generations. Just like solving a big jigsaw puzzle without knowing what it should look like, everything starts from scratch and guesses. 

RePAIR

The ancient Roman city of Pompeii which was destroyed and buried by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in A.D. 79, is now only left with the incomplete architecture and thousands of irregular fragments of ancient artifacts, such as vases and frescoes.

The RePAIR (Reconstructing the Past: Artificial Intelligence and Robotics meet Cultural Heritage) project is proposed by a group of scientists at the Italian Institute of Technology (IIT) to help with the time-consuming and labor-costly physical reconstruction process of Pompeii restoration. The technologies involved in the project are robotics, 3-D scanning, machine-learning algorithms and artificial intelligence. 

The first component is about scanning the fresco puzzle pieces using high-tech computers, using machine-learning algorithms to solve the puzzles, and having human expertise to guide the AI at the same time.

A team of archeologists from the University of Lausanne, who have attempted to solve the puzzle in the past, along with other professional art historians and scholars input their current knowledge about the Pompeii puzzles into the AI algorithm, then let it evolve and study by itself based on those examples, and apply to a larger scale. The computer software will compare all the fragments in pairs and evaluate their degree of similarity based on the shapes, the fitness, and how the illustrations on the pieces match up, which helps draw a picture of what the original complete piece looks like. 

The second component brings robots into the workplace. The robot should be able to scan those pieces on its own, and move the fragments together as a complete one based on the paired results generated by AI. In the end, it will reassemble the pieces together into a finished “puzzle”. Designed by Nikolaos Tsagarakis and his colleagues at the Humanoid & Human Centered Mechatronics Lab at IIT in Genoa, the robot will look like an arm that has a similar size as an average person, weighing 25 to 30 kilograms and lengthening 80 to 100 centimeters. A soft glove hand will be attached to the arm to grab and move the fragments with extreme care, and gather information about them while holding them in hand. The robot will help save a large amount of time and human resources. It doesn’t need to sleep or eat, but can work 24 hours a day without rest. Antonio Bicchi, a senior scientist at IIT in Genoa and the chair of robotics at the University of Pisa is in charge of the design of the robot’s hand, and says the ideal version of it in the future will also be able to allow humans to wear them and gather data during the process.

The project and its techniques are still at the experimental stage. The two experimental subjects will be the frescoes from the ceiling of the House of the Painters at Work, in the Insula of the Chaste Lovers, and the frescoes from the Schola Armaturarum. At the end of the project, the finished frescoes will be exhibited to the public for visitors to experience ancient Pompeii and for researchers to study. And this is the first time in the archeological field that AI will be used at such a large scale, and robotic hands will be responsible for such a large amount of pieces.

Therefore, the progress it can contribute to cultural heritage restoration and human history is significant and meaningful. “If the project succeeds, the technology can be used to reconstruct a variety of fragmented cultural artifacts whose restoration has remained ‘out of human reach’, ” said the project coordinator Marcello Pelillo, a professor of computer science and artificial intelligence at the University of Venice.

The RePAIR scientists aim to install the robot in Pompeii by the spring or summer of 2022. And hopefully, this project will succeed and benefit other cultural sites in the world that need to be repaired.

Scan4Reco

Another EU-funded project called Scan4Reco is also a great example of using artificial intelligence-assisted technologies for cultural heritages’ preservations.

They first use depth-scanning cameras to create a high-resolution 3D replica to transfer the artifact into digital files. Then, more information about the object’s underlying layers which cannot be witnessed directly by human eyes is added to the research by the sensor data.

“Very specialized sensors used in the conservation domain carry out non-destructive diagnostic analysis of the different layers that is equivalent to the more destructive chemical ones,” the deputy project coordinator Dr. Anastasios Drosou explains.

The sensor data is combined with predictive modeling technologies using AI, whose deep learning algorithms simulate the artifact’s appearance as it ages. Therefore, it can suggest conservators with accordingly treatments to protect the artifacts before their conditions get more terrible, or to minimize the existing damages and keep their current looks. According to Dr. Drosou, when the system detects a scratch or some color fading in a painting, the system would advise the conservators to apply a particular chemical on the scratch, or paint or cleaner in the other area.

Digitalization

Another beneficial and impactful progress that technology brings to the field is the digitalization of cultural heritages, where laser scanning and photogrammetry play essential roles. Having digital cultural heritage will help record history, establish a digital library for researchers and future generations to learn about them, and enrich cultural vibrancy.

The Mogao Caves, located in Gansu province in northwestern China, with over 2,000 sculptures and 45,000 square meters of unique and fragile painted murals, all of which are between 600 and 1,600 years old, is facing the challenge of preserving them in their current conditions. 

The caves are great demonstrations of the history of the Silk Road as well as related commercial trades and cultural exchanges across countries. However, due to thousands of years of natural disasters and damages, as well as the overloaded tourists after its development and reopening as a historical visiting site, the speed of painted statues damage and fresco degradation of Mogao Cave is dramatic.

To better preserve this UNESCO World Heritage Site, the researchers and scientists in China decided to use Laser Scanning and Multi-baseline Rotating Photogrammetry to turn the statues and frescos into digital formats, and store them in a safe data library for future studies and possible virtual exhibitions to let people appreciate the caves on their mobile devices with the similar experience as if they were in the caves.

• Photogrammetry: a sophisticated process by which information is extracted from photographs to create accurate three-dimensional maps and models. Using ultra-high-resolution aerial photographs, this practice combines UAV-mounted overhead sensors with powerful GIS mapping systems to create dynamic, measurable documents for a number of real-world situations and uses. (Source: Science Direct)

• Laser Scanning: an automatic, direct measurement of 3D points that can accurately measure and collect data from objects, surfaces, buildings, and landscapes. Laser scanners collect information in the form of point cloud data, which consists of millions of 3D coordinates (XYZ coordinates). (Source: Science Direct)

Another historical site that has been damaged and needed further protection and repair is the Notre-Dame Cathedral which was burnt by fire in 2019. The government is planning for its reconstruction and says hoping to finish by 2024.

Thanks to the digital scanning that they previously did before the fire, the team are now able to create a 3D BIM model of the Notre-Dame Cathedral as it existed before. Then, using recent reality capture scans to create the post-fire 3D model using a 3D design software called Autodesk, and comparing these two versions to rebuild the Cathedral.

Since the roof which was the most burnt part of the Cathedral was made of wood, this cultural tragedy rings the alarm for other historical buildings with wood structures. Performing 3D scanning and modeling to have digital forms of the heritages on file would be a great kind of look-ahead preparation for future possible accidents.

Conclusion

AI and other advanced technologies can help with the restoration and digitalization of tangible cultural heritage. They work as assistants of people on those works that cannot be achieved by human abilities or are time-consuming. They also work as tools for people to utilize and advance their working process to a higher level.

We’ve already seen some great progress that utilizing technologies in cultural heritages’ protections from the above projects and examples. In the future, we can also have a positive prospect that technologies would be able to make more achievements in this area by human inventions and under human supervision.

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