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In recent months the NFT industry, which stands for Non-Fungible Tokens, the technology that allows a digital code to be made unique, found the height of notoriety when the work of the artist Beeple was sold for nearly $70 billion at Christie’s auction house.
The third most expensive work sold at auction by a living artist. In the following weeks, other renowned and historic auction houses such as Sotheby’s and Phillips accompanied their traditional auctions with digital works, starting to give the first signals between the physical and digital worlds.
And today, this space is beginning to be filled. Once again, Christie’s is the revolution’s promoter, reviving the emotion of Leonardo Da Vinci, where the drawing “Head of a Bear” is reborn in the metaverse with the genius of the Hackatao, managing to merge the real with the digital, the past that inspires the future, with their work “Hack of a Bear.”
A bear head, executed by Leonardo in silverpoint on pale pink paper measuring only 7×7 cm and offered in the catalog with an estimate of up to 12 million, now comes to life with a dynamic work through augmented reality technology.
The work commissioned by Christie’s will accompany the drawing’s exhibition in the King Street Rooms from July 3-7 and will be auctioned the following day, July 8.
Several NFT works will be created from this work by Hackatao, one of which will be donated to the Museum of Crypto Art (M○C△), and the others will be available on SuperRare.com, one of the first major CryptoArt platforms.
“One can only assume that if Leonardo […] were living and working now, he would be absolutely fascinated by the rise of NFTs and would probably want to coin his own as well,” says Noah Davis, Specialist, Post War, and Contemporary Art, Christie’s New York. “This collaboration marks an important moment for crypto-native artists like Hackatao, now that their practice is exploding at the highest level in the international art market.”
Italian crypto artist duo Hackatao once again has something to teach us.
The new perspective comes from a project that looks to the future by passing through the bridge that connects all historical eras of humanity: that of universal classical art. And linking a drawing by Leonardo to a unique encrypted code is perhaps the most innovative and audacious current expression imaginable.
It almost seems that the uniqueness and rarity of even a single small drawing representing a bear head, produced by the Master, is no longer for a moment dictating the rules but the infinite container of the blockchain world. Tokenizing genius, this was the goal highly achieved by the Hackatao. And at the exact moment when, on July 8, Christie’s will auction the original work of Da Vinci, the Italian duo of crypto artists will have already toured the planet with the selection of the digital work. I couldn’t help but interview them.
From Hackatao Tex to Leonardo’s Bear’s Head, how is the perception of CryptoArt changing?
At the beginning of 2018, when we tokenized our first work with Superrare, the CryptoArt mainly was ignored by the art establishment (gallerists, collectors, and artists included), considered a little game technologically too complicated to have a future. But those who believed in it and sowed the seeds of a paradigm shift working steadily to build this metaverse have been amply rewarded.
Today the attention on NFTs and CryptoArt is impressive compared to only three years ago. However, there is still much work to be done both technologically and from a sustainability perspective. Hack of a Bear for us represents a chance to go even further, creating a continuum with Leonardo’s art and the new Renaissance 2.0 that we are living and actively building.
We are bringing the new generations closer to the power of art through the playful aspect of the message.
Yes, making art, first of all, is fun, fulfilling, and psychologically resolves a lot of us. Through NFT and CryptoArt, the new generations can express themselves with their native digital languages and have immediate access to an international market without barriers and borders, but above all, decentralized. It is no longer necessary to live in a big city like NYC or to attend a certain entourage to emerge, even if we believe it is essential to participate in the NFT community to make oneself known. And those who enter the crypto-verse intending to build something of value and not for purely speculative purposes will have their playful satisfaction.
Being against contemporary false moral ethics is the new artistic renewal. Is the world of the blockchain?
We don’t know if the world will be blockchain, but certainly, those who live and work in this new dimension have a hard time going back to the old logic. Once you understand the creative application power of blockchain and the founding values of cryptocurrencies, everything else seems complicated and obsolete. For this reason, those who are part of this movement have also chosen freedom.
This interview has been published originally on DeFi Today. Subscribe for free to this newsletter and stay updated with the most exclusive news and interviews.