Have you made as an artist when your work is selling for millions, or when your fans form a DAO to buy your art for half a million dollars as a collective? The latter happened to digital artist pplpleasr, who saw a group of fans group up to pay $569.000 to buy an artwork she made for the Uniswap V3 announcement. All proceeds went to charity organizations supporting minority representation in the United States as part of the Stand With Asians movement.
The PleasrDAO paid 310 ETH or $569.209,60 to formally own the artwork. However, it turned out to be the first of many. The official wallet now contains 266 thousand dollar, the domain name pleasrdao.eth and a variety of artworks. Each of these artworks made by pplpleasr, including her work for Yearn Finance, Pickle Finance and a Blue Kirby artwork.
The DAO is formed by a group of people, including Pool Together co-founder Leighton Cusack, BlueKirbyFi, investor Andrew Kang, Cream Finance founder Leo Cheng, Alex Svanevik from Nansen, and others. According to their Twitter account PleasrDAO has plans to acquire more artworks. As far as we know, it’s the first time a DAO was created buy fans to buy art. We’ve seen funds, like Metapurse, create something like a DAO to own a piece of an artwork, or like WhaleShark, to govern a collection.
x*y=k
The video artwork x*y=k shows all kinds of references to Uniswap, tokens and the DeFi space. There are also strong influences from anime, pop culture and Japanese and Chines art. In the past pplpleasr made viral video content for major brands in the crypto space, including Aave, SushiSwap, Yearn, Poloniex and others. She also worked on CGI videos for Blizzard Entertainment, and worked on movies like Wonder Woman, The Emoji Movie and Batman vs Superman.
The artist herself is happy with the result of her auction. “I’m actually crying”, she wrote on Twitter. “I literally don’t deserve DeFi, the same community that supported my art from day one. The funds will not go to waste, I promise.”
What is crypto or NFT art?
Digital art has been around for decades. However, without the existence of blockchain technology it was impossible to verify authenticity and rarity. Now digital art is connected to a token on the blockchain, a non-fungible token or NFT. That way buyers can see how many copies of a certain artwork there are, and whether the product is original. Digital art on the blockchain used to be referred to as crypto art, but NFT art as a name has become increasingly popular.
The concept of seeing a digital image as art, is one thing. However, for many people it will be a challenge to consider digital images valuable. Consider this: The Mona Lisa is worth many millions of dollars. If I would paint the Mona Lisa in an exact copy, it would be worth only 50 dollars. Because we all know where the original version is. Being able to verify the authenticity and rarity of a piece of art is crucial. This applies to NFT art on the blockchain as well.
Some people don’t care about the Mona Lisa. It’s just a painting. They are happy to download an image from Google Images, print it on canvas and hang it in their living room. Others want the real deal. The same rules go up for digital art. Many people will be happy having a digital image they like, screenshotted on their phone. Others will value having an original artwork, minted by the actual creator, verifiable through blockchain technology.
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