Lessons of A Failed NFT Artist
This is not your typical NFT artist success story.
These are the thoughts of a failed NFT artist for you to consider and maybe think about before you start your career making NFT art.
1. Influencer shoutouts mean more than your art.
It’s one of the hidden truths about NFTs today, where your art is only good if an influencer says it’s good. Instead of the peer critiques, professor reviews, or art critic reviews an artist experienced in art school, it depends on people with followers but not much understanding of art to judge or critique your artworks. Your passionate experimentation of different artistic techniques and mediums does not matter to the NFT influencers. To get NFT influencers to love your art, it has to pass their eye test, or you have to pay them and give them favors.
When I started my second NFT collection FemmeVerse, I had influencers with 50,000+ followers saying they will promote my art in exchange for 3% of FemmeVerse mint (300 NFTs) and 5 ETH, I turned them down because I’m worried to gift that much of my art to one individual or a discord marketer group. The NFT influencers told me this is how the NFT art market works: If an artist wants success, the artist has to work with influencers and marketers. I refused to do so, and probably for that reason, my art is not minting out today compared to those NFT projects with Fiverr-art and 50,000 person discords in 24 hours. It’s not an isolated case in the NFT world, you can ask other independent NFT artists with similar stories of influencers offering promotions in exchange for a substantial amount of NFT mints and money. The NFT space is now favoring marketing tactics, rather than focusing on elevating, discovering, and supporting emerging artists.
2. If you are a shy artist you will have a hard time in NFTs engaging with your collector community.
If you are a shy and socially awkward person like me and afraid to talk with strangers, you will have a hard time in NFT space checking into discords and talking with your collector community. The art school taught an artist to focus on art creation and if miraculously signed to an art gallery, let the art gallery handle promotion and branding for your art. That’s the training I was infused in, to focus on the composition and theoretical analysis of a painting. Imagine my behavioral shock when I realized I had to learn how to use Discord and talk with collectors every day to motivate each other with “WAGMI”, “GM” and other NFT cultural lingos. In a normal art world, a gallery will act as your agent and with artist liaison to help you be the bridge between you as an artist and your art collectors, in NFTs, you are taking on the role of both a gallery and the artist and you have to be able to handle both the art promotion and art creation. If you are like me working a 9-5 office job, it will be a very tough task to handle a discord that may need your attention 24/7, and most of the conversation will not be about art, but about floor prices and things an artist cannot possibly control.
3. The NFT world will involve a lot of redundant and motivational Twitter Space talks and not much substantial content for you to improve and evolve your art.
As an art purist, I create art to express my emotions and wish to learn from other artists who may share their art-making and thought processes in-depth. I enjoy talking with artists, curators, and art professors who share an equal appreciation for art history and have an understanding of references when mentioning other artists’ techniques. For example, I enjoy artist talks like this where ideas can be expanded and shared, and thoughts can be provoked to expand my own art practice:
In the NFT world, most artist talks will happen on Twitter spaces. They are usually organized or moderated by NFT influencers, which will be again filled mostly with “WAGMI”, “We are early”, “Cool art”, and other motivational lingos without allowing an artist to explain the thought and approach behind each artwork with enough time and hearing the equal symbiosis from other artists and participants in the Twitter spaces. As an emerging artist, I find my time more helpful to go to the New Museum and MoMA’s weekend artist talks rather than hanging in Twitter Spaces and not learning much about art nor pushing me to think deep enough to evolve my art.
4. As an artist, you are competing with not just other NFT artists, but gaming companies, sports stars, and marketing groups.
With only 2–3 gallery group shows 5 years after graduating from art school, I thought making it in the real-life art world is already hard enough. However, once I entered the NFT world, I realized to make it here as an artist, it’s the next-level hard. In real-life, an artist only has to compete with other artists in your art school class or city to get signed by a gallery or be in a group show. In the NFT world, there are NFT projects minting 24/7, and not all of them are artist-led projects. Sometimes a football star is doing a pixel art drop, sometimes a marketing group is doing a Fiverr art drop, sometimes a gaming company is doing a metaverse land drop, sometimes an IG influencer with 1 million followers is doing an NFT card drop. There will always be projects with massive traffic that make your project as an emerging artist looks extremely low traffic and not attract enough people who are only in this not for art but to make money as fast as possible. Most collectors in the NFTs do not get that for an emerging artist’s career to build and develop, it may take 3–5 years or even longer for the artist to keep developing the works and mature, in NFTs everything is turbo-speed and artists want to see market success in 24 hours after buying the artwork. And they will use the data from other influencers/celebrities NFT drops to belittle your NFT art project and make you question yourself as an artist.
That’s all for today’s rant from me, a failed NFT artist. I started my NFT art journey in September 2021 but did not see much success as an artist selling my art due to my artworks’ lack of appeal to influencers. I feel crushed and had given up on NFTs and went back to my daily job and tried to forget it all. Recently, seeing the renewed appreciation for female artist NFT projects makes me want to give it one more try to see if my art will get some recognition.
I have no idea how to do whitelists and hype up my community, and the mint of my art probably never will be finished, but I have faith in my art and will let them speak for themselves.
Thank you for supporting my art. (づ｡◕‿‿◕｡)づ
Twitter:
https://twitter.com/nonfungiblelady
Discord:
https://discord.com/invite/AKBcP9jtF4
Les Non Fongible Femme OpenSea:
https://opensea.io/collection/les-non-fongible-femmes
FemmeVerse OpenSea:
https://opensea.io/collection/femmeverse
FemmeVerse Mint:
https://femmeverse.space/
