When I first began to think about NFTs, after sorting through the initial hype and hyperbole, I came to the conclusion that for fine artists, they operated very much like limited edition prints.
When embarking on a limited edition print, if it’s a new way of working for an artist, then the drive often comes from a desire to reach a new audience and offer work at a lower price point. There is an understanding that reworking part of your practice in this reproducable format will allow you to sell to a wider audience and hopefully sustain your studio practice - everything comes back to that.
I thought that the same logic could be applied to NFTs - they would find a new audience, democratise and spread the work, and I could help other artists to pay their rent more easily. I began to talk to those whose work I could see being reframed in this context, and it very soon became apparent that we had concerns around finding the right intersection points for their work within world of NFTs. It would be easy to turn images into jpegs and mint them as NFTs, but as thoughtful contemporary artists, they were interested in seeing it as an opportunity to make work that was as much a product of true artistic output as anything else they would put out in the world.
And of course, this is exactly what happens when you begin to work with printmakers too - you very quickly find that reframing your work in this new context, with these new processes and new materials, leads to possibilities and outcomes that you would never had reached had you not branched out. We began to find that more than offering digital versions of previous work, we were able to reimagine, and that this work took us in unexpected directions.
I will be dropping my own first NFT over the next week, but from July, Greg Rook Advisory will curate a series of group exhibitions on SuperRare - one of the most credible NFT platforms. I am absolutely thrilled to be working with SuperRare and the artists who are included in these shows. Please follow @greg_rook and @gregrookadvisory on Instagram and @gregcorbeau on Twitter for updates on these drops. In the coming months there will also be further collaborations with rights consortiums and first class Contemporary Collections.