📑Market Opportunity and A bit of History

Size and growth potential of the NFT and web3 markets. Analysis of target customer demographics and behaviors.

say Cheese

The NFT and web3 markets present a significant growth opportunity. The NFT market, especially in the realm of digital art, has seen exponential growth, with sales volume surging into billions of dollars. This growth is driven by increasing interest from both tech-savvy and traditional art collectors. Web3 technology, with its decentralized and secure nature, is rapidly gaining traction, offering new ways for creators and consumers to connect and transact. The target customer base is diverse, ranging from millennials and Gen Z, who are digital natives, to older generations who appreciate art and are becoming increasingly tech-aware. These demographics are characterized by their willingness to invest in digital assets and their desire for unique, exclusive experiences.

This text has one important goal: In the 21st century, to pursue the question of whether the work of art will return to its pre-reproduction era elite life through blockchain technologies. It was obvious that a generation that has spent years in the digital environment, and will continue to do so unless a catastrophic catastrophe occurs, would pull the rug out from under the traditional economy and create space for itself. After a very long time (a very long time, if we take the year of information technology as a baseline), the realization that it was time to reap the rewards of this invisible labor and make use of it was sudden. The two most notable subjects of this boom are the angry young people who have turned to cryptocurrency and the artists who have remained on the sidelines. In January 2021, for example, a Reddit group where millions of members gave each other investment advice rushed into the shares of the failing GameStop, in a move against Wall Street-rooted corporations.1 This is perhaps the first hot contact between traditional economics and decentralized finance (DeFi). But the real battleground is the cryptocurrency market.

However, the main point of this text is not the nature of blockchain technology or the role of Generation Z here: what makes many people uneasy is the fact that the NFT offers an opportunity (literally and precisely a marketing opportunity) to young artists who carry the structural crisis of art on their shoulders and at the same time struggle with poverty. Although it could be perceived as a kind of ageism, the emphasis on youth here refers to a purely class relationship. I don't use the term "adult" because I don't want to give space to a definition that marks being young with a kind of inexperience, that determines "knowing" with a deceptive and vague argument like time: older artists and creators (I think they won't object to this) are relatively more privileged and less carefree than younger artists in terms of the channels of opportunity and position they hold. There is also a growing enthusiasm for art production among young people today; of course, depending on the course of the NFT, this could lead to a bigger boom and give us a golden age of artistic production in Turkey. But this boom, just like anything else, could lead to a kind of artifact inflation, the most obvious example of which is photography. The relationship between blockchain and artworks is, at its core, a kind of quantum complexity: What created it and is creating it is also its grave pit. Moreover, for this text, the decentralization of the traditional economy is of no value: As long as the blockchain is subordinated to the neoliberal ground, it is clear that it will create its own financial order, produce its own inequality, and exploit the last remaining natural resources of the world. It is true that the NFT democratizes the art economy, but it makes the existence of the artwork as a product on the market more and more permanent.

Yet today, poverty-stricken young people have nothing to lose but blockchains.

First of all, an NFT (non-fungible token) is a property. Non-fungible in English means "non-exchangeable, non-exchangeable". A token, in direct reference to blockchain technology, refers to a virtual currency or digital asset that can be bought and sold, such as Bitcoin. However, compared to other blockchain properties, an NFT is a property asset that can be encoded on a computer for a single product that cannot be exchanged for anything else. NFTs provide a proof for the owner and against the non-owner: "This product is a unique asset, it cannot be copied, and only 'it' owns it." For now, the uses of NFTs are limited to the assets of the digital world. NFTs on videos, texts, GIFs, paintings, photographs and sounds make "digital things" unique with their unique signatures on these artworks. Painters, musicians, photographers and graphic designers can make money by selling their relatively cheap and simple artworks with the help of NFTs.

NFT is an investment vehicle. Investors who have spent years marketing tangible art have recently been pouring huge sums of money into these digital products. Their confidence in buying and selling digital artworks at astronomical prices is due to their scarcity. For now, NFTs serve as an investment among well-known artists, corporate executives and celebrities, but the trend among young artists is too pronounced to be underestimated. The explosive growth of NFTs, especially in 2020, is directly proportional to the demand for other blockchain assets. In other words, it is clear that we are on the verge of a significant transformation on both cultural and economic levels. In fact, it would not be wrong to say that we have already crossed this threshold with the purchase of a GIF for 587 thousand dollars.

"The typical cultural assets of the culture industry no longer qualify as commodities among other qualities, they have been transformed into commodities in their entirety."

In an age of frenzied marketing of cultural artifacts, the illusion that the producer is a "subject" can be costly for those who evaluate what is happening. Of course, the fact that a cultural artifact is a "product" is a fixed and unchanging fact in our lives today, as it has been for two centuries. Because every single thing is a product, and the value of a thing is determined by its presence in the market. Therefore, the value of cultural and artistic products does not derive from their first reason for being and their aesthetic essence, but from their presence in the market. NFTs are clearly a culture industry practice. But there is still a partial attribution of subjectivity to the producer, especially in the blockchain context. The signatures attached to the work give the artist, as well as the owner to whom the work is sold, control and ownership over the work. For example, for each subsequent sale after the first sale, the producer of the work will continue to earn. Still, given the commissions that digital gallery owners are guaranteed on the sale of these works, we can't say that much has changed about the art economy; the players are the same, only the platform has changed. Adorno says: "The culture industry combines the old and the familiar in a new quality." As Cheeseart, we think we have reached this point.

Christie's, the renowned auction house that has been marketing well-known works of art since the 18th century, bought a digital artwork by an artist named Mike Winkelmann for 69 million dollars on NFT.

It is impossible to exclude intermediaries such as Sotheby's and Christie's, because they are the founding subjects of this new cultural industry and they are part of a network that puts the work of art entirely at the service of the new system. This network integrates cultural forms directly into the profit motive, as Adorno put it.

Matt Hall, co-founder of the CryptoPunks project, creator of the first non-fungible tokens, said: "The miracle of digital was that it was perfect and free to copy. Oddly enough, [blockchain] reverses some of that."

Perhaps today we are experiencing a return of the very reproduction Benjamin spoke of, but in a different way. The encrypted digital identities that the NFT has inscribed on art contents show this. Because NFT puts a kind of unbreakable, bulletproof and filmed glass in the showcase of the unique product that the camera has broken. Isn't the visible demand for unique blockchain signatures - digital identities that symbolize uniqueness, "authenticity" - a marvelous return to the pre-re-production age collector's urge to own and hold only that which is unique? Doesn't this new technical tool no longer copy the work, making it authentic and unique in its own reality, in the virtual world? This time, the technical tool delivers the "originality" and uniqueness of the work of art, the aura that it usurped long ago, on a hard disk. Not here, where I am sitting, and not in time: it is also happening in this world, if we ignore the idea of a post-apocalyptic future. This new technical tool is a tool for another world, a world in which appearances and visions do not exist, a world in which "the shadow of a branch is not cast on our faces" or the Mediterranean sun is not cast from the salty and bright sea, but through a screen, for example on Retrowave album covers. Is this not our new world?

As a device, the NFT, like a camera, begins to store my gaze at the Mediterranean sun and the return I receive from it in a velvet steel case. But then, with the manner of a jeweler presenting a diamond ring to a customer from a special compartment, it drops this unique cargo in front of its demanding collector. And we, as Cheeseart, take advantage of this. We use all of these accelerations (especially the philosophy of our NFT sale) for market advantage.