Artwork from the Multiverse
An NFT project by Danesfield C of E School pupils
11.05.2024 - 09.06.2024

‘It will be cool, amazing and extravagant work that will make you feel wowed and blown away.’

With young people spending more and more time online and their lives becoming increasingly entwined with the internet, digital art has, naturally, become a more and more important mode of expression for the next generation, as well as a disruptive and lucrative force within the art world.

For a short period from 2015 to 2022, the astonishing rise of a form of digital art called NFTs looked like it would transform how digital art was valued, bought and sold, and would democratise who could make and own it.

An early NFT project called CryptoPunks was created by Larva Labs in 2017. It offered 10,000 small, algorithmically-generated, pixelated and unique characters as portraits of people, zombies, aliens, and apes. Less than four years later, Christie’s auction house sold a lot of nine of these Cryptopunks for $16 million. In December 2021, a digital artist called Pak took the record for the most expensive digital artwork ever selling his work The Merge, for $91.8 million. But just a few months later, the NFT bubble burst spectacularly, with millions wiped from value and considerable scepticism and volatility taking hold.

This project, with a Year 7 class at Danesfield C of E School, explored some of these ideas. Over the course of one term, the pupils spent their art lessons researching NFTs and exploring what makes art valuable. Together with our Learning Team, the group explored how traditional art is bought and sold, before taking on different roles in a ‘mock auction’ and finding our more about how certain artworks may rise and fall in value. The group then applied this thinking to NFTs and discussed the pros and cons of this new way of buying and selling artworks.

The students then became East Quay’s digital curators, proposing ideas for a show, choosing the theme of ‘Space’ and then working with a set budget to select NFTs that would reflect on this theme.

‘Let’s create a cool environment that will give understanding to the NFT.’

The class also met with our Curatorial Team to learn about what goes into the planning and production of an exhibition. They were introduced to different ways of displaying artworks, as well as various modes of presenting the accompanying text. Using floor plans and drawings, the pupils illustrated their own ideas for curating the chosen NFT artworks, culminating in the exhibition you see here today.

‘We wanted to create an exhibition that is wonderful, colourful and overall, just out of this world.’

Image credits: Jesse Wild