Curator

gmoney is a crypto currency investor and NFT collector. In January 2021, he purchased CryptoPunk #8219 for $150,000, a record sale at the time, sparking the parabolic rise in CryptoPunks in early 2021. He is an active member of the community and a strong advocate for NFT's and digital ownership rights.

Connect with gmoney on Twitter at @gmoneynft.

Part III: London, UK. July 5th - July 18th, 2021.

SaveArtSpace is pleased to present Pixelated III, a two week-long, public art exhibition on digital bus shelters in London, UK. The exhibition features 12 CryptoPunks & 12 emerging artists.

Emerging artists are Krista Kim, ReWind Collective, Andy Picci, Jeremy Olson, Gordon Cheung, Jonathan Monaghan, John Yuyi, Oseanworld, Megan Ellen McDonald, Jon BurgerMan, Andreas Wannerstedt, and Numerous. Learn more about the emerging artists at institut.co.

During the week of July 5, 2021, SaveArtSpace will launch 24 public art installations for each work on digital bus shelters, in central London, UK. The public art will be on view for two weeks.

Pixelated Part 3 is made possible in part by @sumrtime2, @sillytuna, @larvalabs and many more!

Part II: New York, NY. May 10th - June 6th, 2021.

SaveArtSpace is pleased to present Pixelated II, a month-long, city-wide public art exhibition across phone booths, billboards and bus shelters in New York City. The exhibition features 193 CryptoPunks, one of the first Non-Fungible Tokens (NFT's) ever created on Ethereum.  Each and every one of the 10,000 Punks is unique in their combination of attributes, with some attributes being more rare than others. To display this variety and depth, every attribute is on display throughout the exhibition.

The ongoing Global Pandemic has upended people's way of living, changing the world forever in an instant.  Like our ancestors before us, we had to adapt quickly or perish.  Although NFT's have been around for many years, it wasn't until this recent move to a more digitally focused life, that they really began to flourish.

Much the same way one's style allows them to express themselves in the real world, in communities and organizations across the Internet, people began to display their individuality with their profile pictures.  It was in this digital expression that CryptoPunks really began to thrive.

Pixelated showcases the individuality and creativity of the human spirit in the face of an uncertain future.  That our digital identities don't have to be cold and robotic, but rather can still have that human element of love and creativity.  It celebrates the diverse community of collectors powering the CryptoPunks movement.

The Christie's auction on May 11 marks an historic moment of pop culture significance. It also officially brings Punks into the mainstream. In celebration, we have brought the Punks from Miami to New York!

By bringing these pixelated versions of our online lives to the real world, we hope to show to the world the very human side of this technological revolution.

During the week of May 10, 2021, SaveArtSpace will launch 157 public art installations for each work on bus shelter, phone booths and billboard ad spaces in Manhattan, Brooklyn, & Queens. The public art will be on view for at least one month.

A pop-up exhibition in partnership with Superchief Gallery NFT will mount at 56 East 11th St. New York, NY on Tuesday May 11th, 7p-9p. Please, email info@saveartspace.org to RSVP.

Pixelated Part 2 is made possible in part by Christie’s, @bn1089, @0xSupa, @stephensullivan, @emjicy, @RunHot999, @Loopifyyy, @deepdivedenny, @punk7642, @hyperspek, @sethspalding, @iamDCinvestor, @GuyZalaxy, @TheBull_ThadyQ, @Kaprekar_Punk, @dollar_monopoly, @BryceMauro, @beautyandpunk, @terminus_dr, @fvckrender, @Anonymoux2311, @Gfunkera86, @An0nym0usNobody, @zonked_eth, @flashrekt, @shilpixels, @evkort, @sillytuna and many more!

Part I: Miami, FL. April 12th - May 10th, 2021.

SaveArtSpace is pleased to present Pixelated, a month-long, city-wide public art exhibition across billboards and bus shelters in Miami, FL. The exhibition features 96 CryptoPunks, one of the first Non-Fungible Tokens (NFT's) ever created on Ethereum.  Each and every one of the 10,000 Punks is unique in their combination of attributes, with some attributes being more rare than others. To display this variety and depth, every attribute is on view throughout the exhibition.

The ongoing Global Pandemic has upended people's way of living, changing the world forever in an instant.  Like our ancestors before us, we had to adapt quickly or perish.  Although NFT's have been around for many years, it wasn't until this recent move to a more digitally focused life, that they really began to flourish.

Much the same way one's style allows them to express themselves in the real world, in communities and organizations across the Internet, people began to display their individuality with their profile pictures.  It was in this digital expression that CryptoPunks really began to thrive.

Pixelated showcases the individuality and creativity of the human spirit in the face of an uncertain future.  That our digital identities don't have to be cold and robotic, but rather can still have that human element of love and creativity.  

By bringing these pixelated versions of our online lives to the real world, we hope to show to the world the very human side of this technological revolution.

During the week of April 12, 2021, SaveArtSpace will launch 65 public art installations for each work on bus shelter and billboard ad spaces in Miami & Miami Beach. The public art will be on view for at least one month.

A pop-up exhibition in partnership with Blackdove will mount at 69 East 41st St. Miami, Fl on Thursday April 15th, 7p-9p. Please, email info@saveartspace.org to RSVP.

This public art exhibition was made possible in part by @flamingodao, @gmoneyNFT, @spottiewifi, @3lau, @songadaymann, @cryptonovo311, @ArtOnBlockchain, @justintrimble, @WarcMeinstein, @kevinrose, @niftynaut, @ddaavvee1234, @CSURAM88, @Debussy100, @JordanLyall, @redlioneye13, @straybits1, @beaniemaxi, @ajv, @vonmises14, @AkiraReloaded, @AndrewSteinwold, @cryptosaurus3, @notsofast, @trilldeceased, @RealAllenHena, @seedphrase, @0x_Capital, @alexgausman, @andy8052, @OnlyToasted, @todayodious, @ClaireSilver12, @MrTpunks, @DeezeFi, @BalancedPortfo1, @tonyherrera, @HEEEEEEEEEEE_, @sillytuna, @RTFKTstudios, @maxpowermotors2, @greg_shaheen, @nullinger, @benitopagotto, @zaptio, @clegfx, and more!

CryptoPunks

10,000 unique collectible characters with proof of ownership stored on the Ethereum blockchain. The project that inspired the modern CryptoArt movement. Selected press and appearances include Mashable, CNBC, The Financial Times, Bloomberg, MarketWatch, The Paris Review, Salon, The Outline, BreakerMag, Christie's of London, Art|Basel, The PBS NewsHour, The New York Times in 2018 and again in 2021. The Cryptopunks are the first "Non-Fungible Token" on Ethereum and inspiration for the ERC-721 standard that powers most digital art and collectibles.

The CryptoPunks are 10,000 uniquely generated characters. No two are exactly alike, and each one of them can be officially owned by a single person on the Ethereum blockchain. Originally, they could be claimed for free by anybody with an Ethereum wallet, but all 10,000 were quickly claimed. Now they must be purchased from someone via the marketplace that's also embedded in the blockchain. Via this market you can buy, bid on, and offer punks for sale. Below, you'll find information about the status of each Punk in the market. Punks with a blue background are not for sale and have no current bids. Punks with a red background are available for sale by their owner. Finally, punks with a purple background have an active bid on them.

See the marketplace instructions below to acquire your very own punk. You should also join the Discord Chat, which includes a bot that announces all bids, offers and sales in realtime.

Participating Organizations

Founded in 2015, SaveArtSpace is a non-profit organization that works to create an urban gallery experience, launching exhibitions that address intersectional themes and foster a progressive message of social change. By placing culture over commercialism, SaveArtSpace aims to empower artists from all walks of life and inspire a new generation of young creatives and activists.

Flamingo DAO is an NFT-focused DAO that aims to explore emerging investment opportunities for ownable, blockchain-based assets. NFTs are not just cat pictures. They encompass digital art, collectibles, and in-game assets and other tangible assets. These new forms of digital property are poised to play an increasing role in helping to create, monetize, and incentivize online digital content.

NFTs are not interchangeable, and they thus introduce a new form of scarcity in the digital world. They can represent digital or real-world assets, providing verifiable proof of authenticity and ownership (assuming they are created by the original author or owner) using a blockchain network.

Blockchain developers began introducing NFTs as early as 2016, with projects like Age of Chains and Rare Pepes using Bitcoin to create blockchain trading cards. These early experiments morphed into larger projects during the halcyon days of 2017 to 2018, with the launch of Cryptokitties. Seemingly overnight, Crytpokitties took the Ethereum ecosystem by storm, generating tens of thousands of transactions and clogging the network as users traded lovable cats with one another.

While interest in Cryptokitties may have waned in recent years, the mechanics and growth of NFTs has not. Next generation NFT platforms and marketplaces are incentivizing a new generation of creators to digitize artwork, digital land, and in-game items. Recently, we've seen the emergence of next generation NFTs and platforms, expanding into digital art, land purchasing, and we're beginning to see NFTs intersect with trends in Decentralized Finance ("DeFi").

The growth of NFTs is just beginning, because NFTs represent the digitization and financialization of digital property and intellectual property. Trillions of creative works swirl around the Internet and are difficult to monetize, except through licensing models. NFTs hold out the hope of bringing back to the Internet an ownership economy. Creators can create, sell, and fractionalize ownership in their works, opening up a new chapter for creative endeavor. NFTs can be:

• fractionalized;

• combined into token sets;

• used as collateral for lending and stablecoin protocols; and

• dynamic and interactive, incorporating outside data feeds.

Over the longer arc, NFTs hold out the hope of becoming increasingly financialized, interacting with other core blockchain-based financial primitives. They may prove to be a core primitive for decentralized identity solutions, and may increasingly serve as a cornerstone for monetizing emerging metaverses and other gaming platforms.

Flamingo aims to develop a strong foothold in this emerging ecosystem, bringing together the "hive mind" of a DAO to the world of NFTs. Flamingo will give its Members the ability to develop and deploy NFT-focused investment strategies. Purchasing NFTs with Ether or some other base digital assets pursuant to the terms outlined in these FAQs.

Once purchased, Flamingo could evolve in a number of different directions. Members will have the right and ability to factionalize its NFT holdings. Any purchased NFTs can be lent, held, displayed in a digital art gallery, or used as collateral in other DeFi platforms. The direction is up to the Members.

Larva Labs is the home for our professional and experimental projects.

We're creative technologists that have worked on almost every kind of software. Examples include large scale web infrastructure, genomics analysis software (John has a Ph.D. 🤓), 8-bit roleplaying games, an art project on the blockchain covered by the New York Times that Mashable said “could change how we think about digital art,” the largest open source repository of legal documents that we started at an overnight hackathon, an endless driving game that ends badly (there's a VR version too), an app for Android called AppChat that makes a chat room for every app installed on your phone, two different versions of a completely new Android homescreen experience: Slide Screen (2009!) and Flow Home (2014), a motion tracking dance booth on a beach in France, and an app with Google called Androidify that ended up becoming the worldwide face of the Android brand.

As a result of our work we've spoken at a wide range of venues including the MIT Media Lab, Harvard Business School, Stanford Law School, Art|Basel Miami, The Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard, The NY Tech Meetup, and Christie's Auction House in London.

We've also been lucky enough to have long lasting client relationships with some of the best companies in the world like Google and Microsoft. We're very proud of the work we've done with them, some of which may even be on your phone right now.

Blackdove is a platform for the exploration of artwork developed using digital tools.

Blackdove was founded with the mission to provide the very best experience in digital moving image artwork that the world had to offer.

Digital art as a medium offers artists the creative flexibility to explore new ideas with technology and software code that has never before been available.

As the art itself has shifted to a digital format, so have platform and display technologies evolved to meet the needs of clients seeking to explore and install works in their homes and offices.

We welcome you to Blackdove, a place where digital art thrives in a sustainable financial ecosystem. Artists are compensated directly and immediately as their artwork sells via the platform. Compensation for artists is based either marketplace or royalty based models based on popularity of work on the platform.

Pricing models range from single edition works that are collectible, too limited and open editions that provide varying access or ownership models. New works are added to the platform daily as they become available from artists.

Connectivity to your existing television can be achieved with apps for all major SmartTV platforms including Apple and Android TV platforms. Digital canvas displays are available from 32” to 98” and provide commercial grade options for hanging art in portrait orientation with 24/7/365 capabilities.

ABOUT SUPERCHIEF GALLERY
"Since opening our doors back in 2012, Superchief has held the belief that digital-native artwork was essential to our generation’s larger art movement. This is a watershed moment for the art world at large because NFTs created a system of royalties for digital artists. It's the beginning of a sustainable model in which creators can profit when their investors profit. NFT's are a brand new concept for 99% of the world right now, but basically, they allow collectors to invest in digital art and know that there is provenance, which has forever been the missing element to establish value for digital art.” - Director Ed Zipco

In addition to being the first of its kind in a rapidly expanding marketplace, Superchief Gallery NFT operates as a Carbon Negative platform with carbon credit purchases built into its system, counterbalancing the negative ecological impact of this emerging technology.

XR–Room by Prefixa provides high tech 3D visualization solutions for displaying artwork online. The company specializes in digitally recreating artwork into interactive 3D models compatible in both augmented and virtual reality. XR-Room works closely with artists, galleries, and curators to create virtual events and experiences with the goal of making viewing art more accessible and enjoyable online.

10 things to know about CryptoPunks, the original NFTs

For the first time, 5,184 pixels’ worth of a revolutionary NFT project will go up for auction at a traditional auction house, courtesy of the project creators and pioneers themselves

Making money is art and working is art and good business is the best art.”

Andy Warhol

The world’s first coins were nothing like the small, flat metal discs of standardized shape and weight you are right now visualizing in your mind’s eye. Rather, they were cast in bronze to resemble cowry shells, miniature tokenized abstractions of sea snails, which had previously been used as currency in prehistoric China. Tong Bei—literally translated as “bronze cowry” or “bronze shell”—is perhaps the earliest known minted currency, dating back to the Late Chinese Bronze Age. Other examples of early minted currency originated in Greece, including the famous Lydian coin, struck from an alluvial alloy of gold and silver, and the Croeseid, the world’s first pure gold coin. Since its inception, money has been used to symbolize something it definitely is not. This is most obviously exemplified by the Tong Bei, which were cast to physically replace the fragile cowry shells which the Chinese previously used as currency. But even today, the US Dollar is a kind of subtle abstraction. According to the contemporary philosopher Yuval Noah Harari, “money is the most universal and most efficient system of mutual trust ever devised” (Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind). This “system of mutual trust” is based on a uniquely human shared belief that money, in whatever form it takes, is not only a symbol of value, but becomes valuable in and of itself.

Money is the most universal and most efficient system of mutual trust ever devised.”

Yuval Noah Harari

In 2008, the pseudonymous person (or persons) Satoshi Nakamoto created the world’s first decentralized cryptocurrency, Bitcoin. This purely digital tender survives without the authority of a central bank or lone administrator because its every transaction is verified via a publicly distributed ledger called a blockchain. In the ensuing decade, Bitcoin’s value has skyrocketed from practically nothing to tens of thousands of dollars for a single coin. Its cultural cache has experienced a similar explosion. Bitcoin’s astounding ascent—however volatile—is emblematic of a still-shifting paradigm, one in which the virtual experience is rapidly gaining emotional and psychological purchase on the lived experience.

Over the course of the last year, during a pandemic in which daily life was completely and violently upended, we reached a curious tipping point. In the early months of global lockdown restrictions, people—children and adults from around the world—flocked to the viral videogame sensation Animal Crossing, where they spent hours (daily) meticulously curating their own islands, virtually visiting their friends, or playing cute but frivolous minigames like hunting for bugs, singing karaoke or growing a flower garden. Another sign of the fuzzy membrane between the real and the virtual becoming ever fuzzier.

Towards the end of 2020, people started bidding aggressively to own things that don’t physically exist. Enter the NFT: non-fungible tokens are digital assets which are inscribed indelibly on a blockchain, meaning they cannot be altered, duplicated, forged, destroyed or even successfully squirreled away. The applications for NFT and blockchain technology are mindbogglingly vast and have only just begun being integrated in various industries, but as regards the world of fine art, it’s clear that NFTs have quickly become a collecting category in and of themselves. To own NFT-based art is to own the beating heart and intangible soul of an artwork, with an indestructible Certificate of Authenticity included. While to the general public, it seemed suddenly insane—spending millions to own what was wrongly understood to be just a JPEG or GIF—the advent of CryptoArt, like cryptocurrency, was years in the making.

In 2017, technologists Matt Hall and John Watkinson (also the esteemed consignors of the present lot) embarked on an art project under the moniker Larva Labs. Using the conceptual framework of cryptocurrency, with its radical decentralization and distributed ledger, Larva Labs wrote an algorithm to create 10,000 completely unique 24 by 24 pixel icons of funky cartoon heads in profile. The CryptoPunks—so named for their diverse affinities with the aesthetics of British punk rock culture of the 70s and 80s—were unleashed onto the Ethereum blockchain, where they could be freely claimed by anyone with an ETH wallet. As each and every Punk was quickly whisked away by their new owners, their movements were automatically written into the blockchain.

A fascinating aspect of the CryptoPunks website is the breadth of information recorded therein. Not only can you assess exactly which attributes make each of the Punks unique from one another, you can browse by various criteria such as attributes, owners’ accounts, rejected, pending and accepted offers, discerning a clear hierarchy of collectability amongst the myriad Punks and, if you’re looking closely, identifying any nascent market trends in media res. Imagine if there existed a similar website for works by Pablo Picasso, where every authentic artwork’s market history, including both “private” and “public” sales (a non-sequitur of a distinction in the age of the blockchain) was automatically recorded and readily available to any curious inquirer. How drastically different would those marketplaces be if all that information was simply… out there? One fact is inarguable: in this hypothetical scenario, the art collector has never been more empowered.

Amongst the Punks, there are sprinkled in three non-human types. In reverse order of rarity, they are the Zombie (there are 88), the Ape (there are 24) and the Alien (only 9 exist). The present lot contains a particularly stylish example of the latter. Drawing from the imagined worlds of Sci-Fi and Horror movies such as 2001: A Space Odyssey, Night of the Living Dead and Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Hall and Watkinson endowed their creations with the kind of otherworldly playfulness that is often erased by the passing of youth, whence it is replaced with a dully aching nostalgia for innocent fantasy. The rare non-human types have a similar kind of collectible aura as, say, a first edition holographic Pokémon card, or a clean pair of Nike SB NYC Pigeons. This is not so different than the hallowed patina of the Art Historical canon, whereby Warhol’s soup cans on canvas from the 60’s command prices with drastically many more zeroes than his later editioned soup cans.

“To own NFT-based art is to own the beating heart and intangible soul of an artwork, with an indestructible Certificate of Authenticity included.”

The Punks are non-fungible in the sense that no two are exactly alike, and this standard applies to the non-human types, too. The US Dollar is fungible in the sense that we all agree one 20 dollar bill is worth just as much as any other. But no single Alien is necessarily more or less valuable than another, and this is visibly demonstrated in their assigned accessories. The Alien in the present grouping, CryptoPunk 635, is accessorized with a “Bandana” (481 Punks have this) and “Regular Shades” (527 Punks have this). As of writing, the top two prices paid for any Punks were achieved by Aliens, CryptoPunk 3310 sporting “Headband” (406 punks have this) and CryptoPunk 7804, sporting “Cap Forward” (254 Punks have this), “Pipe” (317 Punks have this) and “Small Shades” (378 Punks have this). On March 11, 2021, user 0x7b8961 successfully purchased CryptoPunk 3310 from user 0x6611fe for 4.2 ETH, or (at the time) $7.58M. In addition to the Alien, the present grouping of nine CryptoPunks, assembled by and consigned directly from Larva Labs, is comprised of eight highly desirable, diverse, low-mint-number human punks—including CryptoPunk 2, only the third Punk ever minted (naturally, there is a Punk 0).

There is a very famous Andy Warhol quote that goes like this: “Making money is art and working is art and good business is the best art.” With the Punks, LarvaLabs have taken this pithy maxim and flipped it and reversed it. In making the CryptoPunks, they made art that is money. More than a century ago, during the winter of 1919, Marcel Duchamp did much the same. He paid for some dental work performed by Dr. Daniel Tzanck—also an art collector and patron of the avant-garde—with a masterfully forged pen-and-ink check to the tune of $115. The check was drawn from an imagined account at “The Teeth’s Loan & Trust Company, Consolidated in New York.” Interestingly, years later, Duchamp purchased the forged check from his dentist for a far greater sum than it was purported to represent. Further proof that money is the greatest system of mutual trust? Perhaps it was art all along.

-Noah Davis, Associate Vice President, Head of CryptoArt and Online Sales, Post-War and Contemporary Art