CryptoPunks

There is no doubt that more words have been scribed about CryptoPunks than any other digital picture, but this is not a history lesson.  Pick a Punk, any Punk, and it will happily stand as THE avatar for the entire scope of NFTs.  Only some of this emanates from the elegant simplicity of the images, brilliant because they were born from a desire for experimentation.  They are an act of pure creation, but Larva Labs didn’t just create 10,000 Punks – they also built a marketplace, one without fees or frictions.

No discussion of digital art is complete without articulating the significance of the transparency and provenance afforded by blockchains.  Never before has anyone been able to examine the entire history of an asset, every wallet that has held it, every price paid, linking creators and consumers in a true peer-to-peer network.  This is immensely liberating.  Anyone critical of the “commercialism” of the art world in the NFT age must pine for the days when artists were beholden to rich patrons, or are happy to ignore Pop Art.  To paraphrase from a different time, in a different market, at least now there is a chance the artists can get paid.    

In case you are curious as to the selection of Punks on display, we had to ask the owners to let us use these pictures, because they hold the copyrights to these iconic images.  What’s more, they all have something in common:  each of these Punks is on loan for this exhibition from Mandala members.  It is often said that anyone can simply rightclick+save any NFT and hang it on their own wall, as we have done here, but that copy cannot be sold, and is worthless.  There is something to be said for the perfection of ownership present in NFTs, and the ability for anyone to recognize the original, simply by looking at the contract.  There is no greater expression of signal, no simpler reduction of noise than these iconic 24×24 pixel jpegs. 

Cryptocurrencies, blockchain, Web3, the path to some living metaverse – they all embrace the idea of a digital identity, and a belief that someday, a digital wallet will be as important as a passport and a credit card.  That interplay between the tangible and the intangible lives in these faces that you see.  They inhabit the rarified air of true cultural artifacts, the ne plus ultra of the PFP.  To frame the value of this narrative, as of this morning, they are collectively worth at least 895.3 ETH, or about $1.47mm USD, making this one of the more valuable digital art displays in Singapore.  To colour that up further, the floor price of a Punk is currently 64 E, or around $104k USD.  We sometimes describe digital generative art as the art of the future, but as you can see, the future is now.