The artists using blockchain and NFTs to keep their work unique (and valuable)

Nonetheless, by April, Dutch brand Moooi had managed to put Reisinger’s “impossible” (so-called by the designer) Hortensia chair into production, its digitally rendered, hyper-real form now made into a physical chair covered in 30,000 pink polyester petals. Not even Moooi, however, a company renowned for its genre-bending aesthetic and advanced fabrication capacity, could do the same for Reisinger’s vision of an oozing sofa or serpentine chrome shelving.

“The NFT space is filled with tropes and tricks, cliches really,” says Australian digital artist and designer Jonathan Zawada. “Astronauts, moons, chrome body forms. There are a million and one 3D tools you can get off the shelf to create digital artwork. NFTs are just a means to secure the design, be it good or bad.”

Zawada’s designs are very good indeed. As well as designing the illumination of the Opera House sails for the 2018 Vivid Sydney festival, he’s created videos and cover art for musicians such as The Avalanches – “featuring”, he laughs, “a moon!” – and Flume. He began minting NFTs from extracted elements of these just as Reisinger’s work was going to auction.

“I’d started getting DMs [direct messages] from people in late 2020 saying how this new technology could be good for me and my work,” he recalls. “And when it exploded in February it became clear very quickly that, aside from the potential earnings, the biggest impact was going to be the way the tech consolidated a sense of community.”

On the other hand, NFTs he’d minted for The Avalanches and Flume “got a lot of flak” from fans who felt the musicians should be making albums, not NFTs.

“They saw NFTs as a stupid badge of ego for rich people,” says Zawada, noting that “we invented the internet as a way of making information completely free. And it only took us 20 years to work out how to create scarcity in order to inflate perceived value.”

Reisinger, who reckons the NFT frenzy is partly a result of wealthy collectors not being able to travel to art fairs because of COVID-19, reckons “we are on the threshold of a new era in which art and culture are freed from spatial and temporal constraints and the rules of experience rewritten”.

Moooi is available in Australia via Space Furniture.

The July issue of AFR Magazine – plus the Travel special – is out on Friday, June 25 inside The Australian Financial Review. Follow AFR Mag on Twitter and Instagram.