Above is a picture I painted several years ago. The color isn't perfect but you get the idea. Titled Trumpeting Angel, the work is oil on canvas, measuring 29 x 30 inches. In the background behind the angel are Kokopelli, the flute-playing fertility deities venerated in the Southwestern US. The painting was based on a drawing by Edgar Degas titled Angel Blowing a Trumpet, currently held by the Cleveland Museum of Art.
This artwork has hung in the entryway of my house for years. Two days ago it was taken down and placed into storage, along with twenty other paintings that had long graced the walls of the big old Victorian home. Now much of my art is in stacks under drop cloths and there's no art on the walls. It makes no sense, but that's the situation.
Last week, I met with my uncles who own most of the house and they said that all of my art must be immediately taken down. Ahead of the meeting, they'd said that the issue was nudity in some of my paintings, so I went in thinking we were going to go over which specific pieces they wanted removed. Then they told me that the house was eliminating all art. So I complied with their insane demand and I have mixed feelings about it.
It's stressful to have the art in storage due to the possibility that it could be damaged by unforeseen hazards. My uncles' choices seem selfish and ill-considered. And now, because of these choices, showing prospective buyers my paintings just became massively more complicated.
With nothing to do but move forward, I'm considering the future of this art. Tallying up the inventory, I found a total value of just over $52k and that got me thinking. This stuff plus another pile of paintings I have stored in a different location might make a collection worth $60k. My general plan has been to sell this art a piece or two at a time over a period of 20 or more years. This plan has been working perfectly, but now I have nowhere to display the work.
At the same time, I've been talking with @lovejoy recently about the possibility of many people issuing their own tokenized assets to raise funds against the goods and services they provide. I could issue $60k worth of art gift certificate tokens, promising to redeem them on demand for their artwork equivalent. If a large number of other people issue similar tokens backed by whatever they have to offer, a very interesting token marketplace could develop.
The first question this scheme raises is whether to issue a simple token or NFTs. Some people are issuing NFTs connected to physical artworks. This could in theory work for my situation, but it wouldn't produce fungible tokens, and the tokens it would produce would be priced high. A scheme where each token has a small fixed redemption value, say one dollar, would make the gift certificate tokens much more affordable for collectors or supporters.
Issuing these tokens is technically feasible on several blockchains. EOS and Ethereum are both attractive for different reasons. I've made custom tokens on both chains and found Ethereum to be easier while EOS was more cost-effective. Beyond token issuance, there would need to be some kind of marketplace where the public could interact with the assets. Ideally, this would be a site where people could create their own personalized tokens and swap these tokens for other people's tokens. There is also the legal angle to consider. Hopefully by treating these tokens as gift certificates, they won't be misidentified by the SEC as unregistered securities.
Read my novels:
- Small Gods of Time Travel is available as a web book on IPFS and as a 41 piece Tezos NFT collection on Objkt.
- The Paradise Anomaly is available in print via Blurb and for Kindle on Amazon.
- Psychic Avalanche is available in print via Blurb and for Kindle on Amazon.
- One Man Embassy is available in print via Blurb and for Kindle on Amazon.
- Flying Saucer Shenanigans is available in print via Blurb and for Kindle on Amazon.
- Rainbow Lullaby is available in print via Blurb and for Kindle on Amazon.
- The Ostermann Method is available in print via Blurb and for Kindle on Amazon.
- Blue Dragon Mississippi is available in print via Blurb and for Kindle on Amazon.
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See my NFTs:
- Small Gods of Time Travel is a 41 piece Tezos NFT collection on Objkt that goes with my book by the same name.
- History and the Machine is a 20 piece Tezos NFT collection on Objkt based on my series of oil paintings of interesting people from history.
- Artifacts of Mind Control is a 15 piece Tezos NFT collection on Objkt based on declassified CIA documents from the MKULTRA program.