At least two of my purchases on SuperRare were followed by an overture by the artist to send along a physical print. Joshua Davis (aka Praystation) offered me to pick any frame in “The V01D / 034–003” and ship me a signed physical copy. But imagine what a musician or other celebrity “minting” a piece of their work for ownership might offer or entitle to its owner? Perhaps a private audience or some other special experience? Perhaps you get a VIP treatment forevermore? When you play this out — and the opportunity to fractionalize such offerings — this could be bigger than the business of live events. Perhaps you no longer go through middlemen and centralized ticketing or brokerage industries for such experiences when you can simply own a piece of the artist's work and get direct access in exchange?
A new stack of technology and participants will emerge.
We’ll see a cohort of highly curated galleries emerge, like SuperRare. We’ll see other sites that simply act as sources of truth for all that’s going on or serve as open marketplaces, like OpenSea, Showtime, (and perhaps Behance might help in a more platform capacity as well from a portfolio perspective, as its 25M+ members discover CryptoArt?). We’ll see new variants and alternative blockchains like how Flow is being used for NBA Top Shots. And we’ll see plenty of “picks and shovels” type companies emerge to power functionalities like Magic Link for payments, NiftyKit for independent “minting” of assets, Bitski that allows big brands/creators to mint NFTs along with certain entitlements and media, and the list goes on.
This Will Yield Entirely New Uses For Creative Tools
While I’ve committed my life to empower creators of all kinds — from artists and product designers to entrepreneurs — to overcome the obstacles to make ideas happen, my day job is running products at Adobe. So what’s the role of Adobe and the creative tool space in all this?
I’ve spent a lot of time over the last few months connecting with top crypto artists and learning about their workflow and challenges. Guess what? Most of them are using Photoshop and Illustrator on desktop, and some have discovered the latest iPad/Tablet apps like the (quite groundbreaking) Adobe Fresco and the newly reimagined Photoshop and Illustrator on iPad. My hope is that creative career opportunities, like selling your content and creating crypto art, among others, become better integrated into the tools overtime to make these capabilities more user-friendly and accessible. I also think digital toolmakers have a responsibility to understand the new and growing needs of the world’s best crypto artists.
But at the end of the day, art is about meaning.
And all of this analysis brings us back to where we started: The Furry Lisa.