Media Kit

Press Release

Record $100K sale in Crypto Art: Matt Kane’s “Right Place & Right Time,” a digital artwork that changes daily with Bitcoin price volatility, sells for $100K on Async Art platform. 

Sept 18, 2020 – The record-breaking sale of Matt Kane’s “Right Place & Right Time” on Async.art marks the first time a piece has sold for more than $100,000 in the emerging Crypto Art movement. This is another historical sale for a digital artwork in the form of a non-fungible token (NFT), marking the importance NFTs will have in the future virtual economy, where any asset will be tokenized.

The artwork is not just a static image, but continues to generate a new artwork each day based on Bitcoin price volatility. The work is composed of 24 Layers that are synchronized with Bitcoin’s price action from the previous 24 hours. Together with the influence of the artist himself, a new variation of the Master artwork can be generated daily.

“It’s humbling. I’m most excited I’ve helped open price levels for other digital artists to have their work taken seriously and begin making a living from art sales,” said artist Matt Kane. “Until we could prove provenance and scarcity on the blockchain, how we sold digital art was prehistoric by comparison. The future is finally now!”

The patronage of TokenAngels, the artwork’s collector, allowed the artist an opportunity to experiment with a new economy; one in which the collector of a generative artwork gains a financial interest in subsequent minted variations of the art piece. Through the website http://volatility.art, the artist will periodically put a digital art NFT on market to represent an important day in the life of Bitcoin. This NFT will also grant its token holder the right to purchase a physical print.

“As a nod to Bitcoin’s 21 million fixed supply, the collector receives 21% revenue share of the individual NFT and print sales and there will only be 210 NFTs minted. Our partnership, a first between artist and collector, is one we hope inspires future partnerships, which will continue to innovate upon and strengthen this new model we’ve birthed,” says artist Matt Kane.

Bitcoin began as an experiment in decentralized digital currency, enabling peer-to-peer payment with no central authority. It has run a decade so far, empowering users to become their own banks, on it’s way to mining a total supply of 21 million. This artistic experiment will run as a creative counterpart to Bitcoin, using visualized volatility to aid the artist in mining 210 NFTs. “I’ll be investigating what a decentralized artwork can evolve into, as proof-of-work necessitates increasing challenges over time. I’m excited for what this means for minting my NFTs. But just like Bitcoin, the passage of time will be required in order to observe the grander masterpiece that is at work,” says Kane.

Estimated to run for the next 10+ years, this promises to become one of the longest running art projects ever, demonstrating the trust both parties have in the importance Bitcoin and blockchain will carry in future daily life. One day at a time, “Right Place & Right Time” could grow to become one of the most significant pieces in the Crypto Art movement. Both the artist and collector hope this “MKTA” experiment, which mixes programmable and generative art with the first partnership between artist and collector, will contribute to the long legacy of experimentation and risk taking in art and technology.

Watch daily changes on “Right Place & Right Time” by visiting website, or the Twitter bot the artist created. For more from artist Matt Kane, visit his website, Twitter, or Instagram.

Follow Async Art on Twitter, Instagram, and join the community in Discord to get the latest on programmable art. 

About the Artist

Matt Kane is a Chicago born artist whose oil paintings granted a successful entry into the collectors’ driven market back in 2004. Still in his twenties, Kane soon left exhibitions and galleries behind to become a web developer. As a self-taught programmer, he designed the custom software with which he produces his vibrant, infinitely detailed and multilayered artistic visions.

Predominantly figurative, his current practice addresses and reworks the most varied subjects, from art history masterpieces to Victorian eery family pictures to contemporary icons, coating them in intricate, audaciously coloured patterns. In his own words, Kane is “interested in exploring historical aesthetics with code; to do with geometry what the great painters did with oils.”

Among the pioneering artists to contribute to “First Supper”, the first-ever programmable artwork on the Ethereum-based Async Art platform earlier this year, Kane keeps leveraging algorithms to reach the poetry of pointillists, homage the vibrancy of Kusama’s polka dots and go beyond.

Bio credit: Chiara Braidotti of MOCDA

About the Collector

TokenAngels is an angel investor in startups, dedicated to the traditional and new digital economy. He is one of the foremost collectors of NFTs and Crypto Art. He can be found on Twitter and Instagram.

About Async.art 

Async Art is a new art movement built on the blockchain. Create, collect, and trade programmable art: digital paintings split into “Layers”, which you can use to affect the overall image. Art that can evolve over time, react to its owners, or follow a stock price is now all possible with programmable art.

Launched in February 2020, there has already been over $2,300,000 exchanged on the platform and over $400,000 in artist sales.

Media Contacts

Matt Kane, The Artist
https://mattkane.com
@MattKaneArtist
Instagram
matt@mattkane.com

TokenAngels, The Collector
https://www.tokenangels.com
@TokenAngels

Artwork Images

Artist Headshots

A Letter to the Crypto Art Community

RIGHT PLACE, RIGHT TIME, RIGHT COLLECTOR

Sept. 18, 2020 — I’m pleased to announce that in TokenAngels I found the right collector for “Right Place & Right Time, Bitcoin Hourly Price Offset,” my first Async Art master NFT. This event triggers the launch of a new NFT project and website Volatility.art. This website is the new home of this artwork, where a new composition is created daily based on Bitcoin price volatility. Or if you prefer, follow the site’s Twitter-Bot, @VolatilityArt, tweeting a new artwork daily at 12am GMT.

FIRST NFT GENERATING NFTs

I’m most excited to announce the birth of my new NFT project; one I will maintain a direct hand in minting and maintaining its creative direction. Over the course of what I anticipate to be the next 10+ years, there will be 210 generative edition NFT’s minted, featuring images generated by the artwork and curated by the artist. Having minted an NFT titled “Artist Intent Token,” I’m excited to explore what treating a digital artwork as a work-in-progress over such a length of time can mean, reporting the history to come of Bitcoin and visualizing its most important days and events.Additionally, this project expresses in a tangible form my commitment to and belief in proven scarcity and provenance established on blockchain.

COLLECTOR’S CUT – A NEW PARTNERSHIP BETWEEN ARTIST AND COLLECTOR

There are many innovative economies being experimented with in the NFT space ( Fractioning, Lending, Social Currency). It’s worth risking to try something new in an effort to discover whether there’s something in this model that could work for other artists in the future. The collector will receive 21% of profits generated by sales of NFTs and prints featuring the Master artwork he owns. As both an artist and collector, it makes sense to me that a benefit of digital art ownership on the blockchain can mean holding a financial interest in the future success of an artwork via prints, nfts, other merchandising avenues, and certainly any concept an artist dreams up. And should the collector sell the master nft in the future, our agreement will be transferred and inherited by the new owner.

MORE APPRECIATION. LESS SPECULATION.

In the interest of transparency and respect for all collectors in the space, I wish to explain why the sale of this artwork was direct, circumventing auction. Because this artwork is a larger enterprise that I am interacting with over a lengthy period of time, it feels like the collector owns a piece of the artist. This is why it became imperative to locate a collector relationally, not speculatively. The function of auctions is largely to speculate and to perform price discovery. And of course, the highest bid wins. A gamble on whom might own the work would be contrary to my values and larger vision for this particular artwork, so I sought to find a collector relationally. I needed to follow my heart, gut, and goosebumps.

M.K. & T.A.

Every now and then since December, TokenAngels and I exchanged messages. Usually short, but sometimes very in depth and meaningful. After speaking the first time, what struck me was how we both came into caring deeply about positively contributing to this community and emerging technology. Where I’d taken up the petition with other artists to set a fair minimum secondary sale royalty across platforms, TokenAngels imagined what it might mean to an emerging market if early collectors also got a small % of secondary sale royalties. The question intrigued me. That innovation, bringing the first collector into the lifetime economy around an artwork, gripped my imagination. I’d certainly be more apt to buy an artwork if I got a lifetime stake in it. As early adopters, we are here to experiment, try new things, take risks, and certainly not let traditions of the past prevent progress of the future.

“So Matt, when do you think the Async auction will be? I wanna be sure I’ll be in front of my screen that day.” In August, I showed TokenAngels a soft launch version of Volatility.art and explained I’ve been thinking I might not do an auction and instead locate the right collector another way. He asked how much I’m thinking. Never imagining he would respond in an affirmative, but seeking if he thought I was of sane mind for how I valued the work, I told him 100K. To my great surprise, he said “Okay. I really want this. But let’s make sure we do this right and make this something special, something revolutionary, that will remain in the books.”

The conversation that happened next gave me goosebumps. Without ever explaining to him that I wanted the collector to be more of a partner with a financial interest in NFTs and prints that the artwork generatively created, TokenAngels proceeds to tell me his vision. It was nearly identical to mine. And why not? It was a tweet he made in December which must have inspired my thinking in the first place. I knew then how special this partnership was and that the collector had to be TokenAngels. How else could I know a collector was truly on board with a concept unless they tell me the concept without hearing it from me first?

For the collector, 100K is a large sum of money and in no way a trivial amount to spend. In his own words, TokenAngels explains his patronage this way: “This is one of the perfect artworks that has Crypto Art ingredient, programmable art, generative art, the pumping heart of Bitcoin. It is in my opinion the first artwork that has all of this and I’ve been looking for one artist to do something like this. This is the artwork I’m waiting all this time to buy.”

LIKE A BEAUTIFUL FLOWER

We think of this larger project like a beautiful flower. It will grow with time to have 210 petals. Bitcoin volatility is like wind. Stronger winds threaten to blow off more petals. And the artist must tend to his flower– watering it and changing out the soil at appropriate times. Each petal is precious and the artist collects them when they fall off to make sure each finds the right home. These petals will tell the history of the biggest financial, economic, social experiment probably in human history. A maximum of 210 collectors will have the possibility to join in this artwork, collecting a special moment in the life of Bitcoin, as this revolutionary currency brings forth life changing events into countless more lives.

Finally, what MK and TA wish for the most is that this new artist & collector partnership is seen as an honest experiment between virtual friends that respect each other and are trying to create something new, beautiful, and historically important while opening the possibility for other collectors to become part of this humble little project.

Sincerely,
MK & TA