✅Five Most Inspiring NFT Artists of 2021💡Special Edition 💬
❤️NFTs roared to mainstream attention in 2021—and it was all driven by the artists. Here are the 5 NFT artists you need to know about.📡
NFTs have been around for a few years. But in 2021, non-fungible tokens shot to prominence, as multi-million dollar NFT artwork sales made headlines around the world and the art establishment wrestled with the sudden emergence of a new artistic movement.
At the forefront of this NFT evolution are the artists: the pioneers who've led the charge towards NFTs, and the innovators who've experimented with this new technology, pushing the boundaries of what it means to create art as blockchain-based assets.
We've looked over the past year's NFT highlights to compile our list of the most inspiring NFT artists of 2021.
Beeple - There is no one that’s equal, everyone is the sequel.
Michael Joseph Winkelmann, known professionally as Beeple, is an American digital artist, graphic designer, and animator. He is known for using various mediums in creating comical, phantasmagoric works that make political and social commentary while using pop culture figures.
Beeple sold an NFT titled “EVERYDAYS: THE FIRST 5000 DAYS,” a collection of his digital artwork spanning 13 years, for a record $69.3 million in a Christie’s auction. The sale instantly made him one of the most valuable living artists in the world, and catapulted him—and NFTs—into the spotlight.
One thing's for sure; the art establishment better gets used to the fact that Beeple isn't going anywhere and he will be dropping every day and everywhere.
Pak - Don’t Fak With Pak they will not be stopped.
PAK a pseudonymous artist (or artist collective) NFT project sells for $91.8m, debatably achieving the highest price ever for a work by a living artist!
Sales of the new project by Pak point to increasing gamification in the NFT market, though the superlative total sum comes with a number of caveats
Thousands of collectors are staring at their digital wallets today, wondering how their investments in The Merge, an NFT (non-fungible token) by Pak, will measure in their collections.
Launched on the NFT platform Nifty Gateway, more than 28,000 buyers spent an eye-watering total of $91.8m to acquire 266,445 total units of mass (for those who did not join in on the sale, “mass” is analogous to “digital token” and allows for some interesting wordplay with the terms of the sale). According to Nifty Gateway that could make this sale the most expensive ever for a work by a living artist.
Pak was one of the first artists to prove that you can make it big in NFTs, selling $1 million worth of digital art last December but from his last 91.2 million “Merge” sale that was just the beginning.
Gremplin
CrypToadz are owning the Collectible space with its referential art NFTs. It is the brainchild of Gremplin, the artist behind the iconic art of Nouns DAO. The sold-out series of 6969 toad-themed Collectibles leaped through the NFT charts since its launch last September 8.
The narrative behind the Collection was injected with tons of crypto and NFT references. For example, CrypToadz are small amphibious creatures that roam the swampy basin of Uniswamp, which is a reference to the Uniswap Exchange.
Gremplin created colorful lore around CrypToadz in which he portrays himself as the Evil King Gremplin that 6,969 CryptToadz try to escape from. He threw into the mix a generous portion of pixelated aesthetics and meme references (hint: collection number), especially the frog theme that’s prevalent in crypto.
Despite being a new collectible with barely a month of history, CrypToadz brought in a massive volume. At its opening week, the total tradeable volume was at 5500 ETH or over $17 Million. So five days post-launch, the project ranked 3rd on OpenSea’s list of top new NFT Collectibles.
Pplpleasr: The NFT artist who spawned a movement
Emily “Pplpleasr” Yang NFT artist Pplpleasr has created visual effects for films like Wonder Woman, Batman vs Superman, and Star Trek Beyond. She’s also become the “DeFi artist, spawning an entire movement. After several successful collaborations with DeFi companies, she has had two auctions which evolved into a DAO which directed over $1 million in proceeds to charity.
Pplpleasr is deeply embedded within the DeFi space, producing whimsical ads for many of the major DeFi protocols such as Pickle Finance, Harvest Finance, Yearn Finance and SushiSwap. In April, she sold an animated Uniswap ad for $525,000 as an NFT.
The buyer was a decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) called PleasrDAO, which was initially set up to pool resources to buy her artwork but now continues to operate as an investment DAO—with pplpleasr now also an honorary member.
Since then, she's emerged as one of the leading lights of the crypto art scene, producing work that experiments with the smart contracts that underpin NFTs and working alongside the DAO that formed to collect her work.
Speaking to Fortune at the time of the sale, pplpleasr said that, "My goal of selling NFTs for a living has shifted to seeing how I can use NFTs to innovate and pave new paths."
Gary Vee - an NFT Guru and lord of his own metaverse
The art is simple but the community is complex and Gary Vee works harder and smarter than anyone we have seen and he is one of the the best!
Hand-drawn doodles by entrepreneur Gary Vaynerchuck, also known as Gary Vee, were auctioned off at Christie’s on for a combined $1.2 million USD.
Vaynerchuck’s five artworks — Tremendous Tiger, Gratitude Gorilla, Empathetic Elephant, “Diamond Hands” Hen and “You’re Gonna Die” Fly — were used in part to create his VeeFriends NFT series, a collection comprised of 10,255 token NFT projects that run on the Ethereum blockchain.
GaryVee has been a crucial voice in the NFT community and has been driving the space adaption by mainstream and by his corporate clients like US Open and Pepsi.
Gary Vee spoke about making it in business with the signature full-throated conviction that has turned a lot of young men into fanboys. Vaynerchuk, who has 9.3 million followers on Instagram, preaches the NFT gospel, but anyone hoping for alpha on the next NFT drop to mint was in for a disappointment. “I believe there is a 100 percent chance of a massive dip” in NFTs, Vaynerchuk told the crowd. “I think there’s an enormous amount of carnage coming, and the amount of money that’s going to be lost is going to be staggering. Don’t let your short-lived financial arbitrage be the foundation of your point of view. It’s clouding the shit out of people.”
Gary Vee became an angel investor (Twitter, Uber, Venmo), a branding expert (VaynerMedia has 1,200 employees and offices in Mexico City, London, and Singapore), an author of best-selling books with chin-out titles like Crush It! and Jab, Jab, Jab, Right Hook, and a hustle coach for the Instagram generation, dispensing an older-brotherly mix of encouragement and tough love. At the Tribeca event, he shared Gary Vee–isms like “Humility combined with curiosity can get you everywhere” and “Don’t be scared to say, ‘I don’t know’; so many of you have lost by faking the funk.”
The Belarus-born Vaynerchuk, who in his own description has “an immigrant’s chip on my shoulder,” was unwavering when people on Twitter mocked his NFT artwork, and now he’s having the last laugh: VeeFriends netted Vaynerchuk more than $30 million (and now has a market cap of more than $500 million!
With NFT’s generating over 22 Billion in trading this year we expect next year to really catapult NFTs to the forefront of Art and Media and continue evolution in the space with attracting more incredible artists
DISCLOSURE
THE AUTHOR OWNS or WOULD OWN ALL AND ANY WORK BY THE ARTISTS MENTIONED IN THE LIST.