How to frame NFT
So let’s say you bought an NFT. Not because you want to make a lot of money and you’re just going to turn it around – we call these people the JPEG flippers – and not because someone sold you on a great idea of ”community” and you did not buy an NFT as much as a link to a Discord – it’s the yacht clubs – but you bought it because you just liked what it looked like. Maybe you’re a collector, maybe this is the first valuable piece you’ve ever acquired. Either way, you bought it so as not to sell it or use it. You bought it to look at it. You want to hang it up in your home!
On the one hand, you have many ways to display your digital art. After all, it’s just a picture. (You can even – gasp – just print the thing and hang it on the wall.) Almost every screen you have will display it nicely, and it’s always there on your phone no matter what. But your 50-inch LCD panel will not do justice to the piece, but really will not.
As NFT art becomes more valuable, and as artists begin to care more about how their digital art is displayed in the real world, the question of how to display your digital collection has become more complicated. Galleries that want to promote digital art need to reconsider not only the devices they use, but also the way they illuminate the gallery and how people move through it. Artists, who are used to their work always keeping the shape it was created in, must now think of both digital and physical versions of their creations. Art collectors are often faced with a whole new set of decisions about how to display their works. And you thought NFTs were complicated.
Scott Gralnick has been thinking about NFT screens for a while. He is now a co-founder of Lago, a company building a $ 9000 NFT framework designed for advanced collectors, but he has been in crypto and Web3 for almost a decade. When he talked to other crypto whales, says Gralnick, the same thing continued to appear. “I have a multi-million dollar collection,” they said, “and I had to retrofit it to a television. I do not want to show it on my computer, I do not want to show people my phone, how can I get this into my home? ”
Gralnick and his co-founders set out to build something for these peoples, but also something that could entice traditional art buyers – who may not be wondering about the idea of telephone-bound art at all – to enter the NFT area. “I had friends who had dinners with Christie’s and Phillips and Sotheby’s, and they get NFTs, they get embossed artwork,” Gralnick said. “But it came down to one question each time: how do I like this at home?”
Gralnick now calls the Lago framework a tool for “mass consumption” of NFTs, which is quite a lot to say about a $ 9000 framework. The team wanted to be absolutely sure that you could not confuse the frame of a TV, so they chose a 33-inch square screen of 1920 x 1920. An optional camera sits under the frame, just above an optional soundboard, which both artists can use for to reinforce their pieces. “Maybe they’re building something that can be unlocked,” Gralnick said. “If I do the right movement sequence, it unlocks it. Or maybe I turn around and actively throw it to the other frame.” You can use the Lago frame to display one NFT, or use the corresponding mobile app to browse the entire collection, or, if you are so inclined, present a rotating set of pieces curated by NFT influencers. (Gralnick says these are coming with clear indications of which pieces you own and do not own, so no one pretends that the monkey is yours.) In that sense, the frame can be both a display and a distribution channel – an NFT museum in your own home.
Astronomical price and all, Lago sold the entire stock in advance orders. This is not surprising: the dedicated NFT screen is a thriving industry. Tokenframe displays range from 10 to 55 inches and cost up to $ 2777. Netgear has actually turned its digital photo frame business into an NFT business – and their Meural monitors have up to $ 599.95. Canvia pulled off a similar pivot. Blockframe and Danvas and others all make similar promises about their luxurious digital art exhibitions, although most startups are still in the hype and pre-order phase. For the do-it-yourself audience, you can use a Raspberry Pi and TokenCast protocol to build your own NFT screen for cheap money.
Because all you technically need to get into business is an LCD monitor – and not even a particularly advanced one – getting started in the industry has come and gone quickly. Qonos, for example, was launched in 2021 and said it sold out its first series of frames that could access the owner’s own collection plus an entire gallery of Qonos-curated artwork. Now there are virtually no characters left of Qonos other than a private Squarespace site. (Qonos founder Moe Levin did not respond to a request for comment.)
Joe Saavedra, the founder of Infinite Objects, thinks all this is a bit much. Many companies, he says, “really make TVs that do much less than a TV. And finally there’s a gallery, a slide show of your NFTs, so it does not matter about this NFT you paid $ 10,000. for, and this was an Airdrop, they are right next to each other. And you just sweep through. ” When he set out to build an NFT framework, he wanted to build the least interactive, least gadget-y thing he could make.
Infinite Objects started by “printing video”, which in practice means embedding a screen in a single frame, setting a single video to run on a loop forever within that frame, and sending it to you. “When you take it out of the box, it settles in your hand,” says Saveedra. “It has no buttons or switches, there is no interface at all.” The result is much closer to a painting straight out of Harry Potter – a moving piece inside an immobile object that hangs on the wall or sits on your shelf.
Saveedra now does the same with NFTs. Infinite Objects worked with Mike Winkelmann, who you may know as Beeple, to create and send physical versions of all NFT Winkelmann sales. It also works with Dapper Labs, and is the official framework for NBA Top Shots. Getting NFT printing starts at around $ 120. You can buy frames from 6.4 to 11.4 inches high, the screens are surrounded by either bamboo or acrylic. The screens themselves are not particularly impressive – 1024 x 576 on the largest model, lower resolution than the original iPad in 2011 – but Saveedra seems to think that the very existence of a durable physical object is the most important. “If it’s on a TV, I can just turn it over, right?” he says. “Okay, cool, next.”
Steve Sacks, the founder of the bitforms gallery, who has been presenting digital art for two decades, also falls for the “don’t just put it on a TV” side of the equation. “You do not want to go to the NBA Finals and then turn on your $ 100,000 artwork,” he says. “It takes away from so many things.”
Some artists, Sacks said, care deeply about the screen their artwork ends up on. They will dictate a specific resolution and aspect ratio, even the size at which their piece will be displayed. Others will go so far as to actually create the object on which their work is to be displayed. In that case, Sacks says: “The artist gives us a sculpture. Art is not just the content; it’s the item that comes with it. ” But many of the things bitforms show and sell are what he calls “unframed works”, where the file is sold and the buyer can show it as they wish.
At the Quantus Gallery in London, things work a little differently. Josh Sandhu, a co-founder of Quantus, says that when the team was set up for its first NFT exhibition, they tested six or seven different TVs. Now 36 Samsung Frame sets stand along the walls, some vertical and some horizontal. “The matte look, it’s quite like an actual print,” Sandhu said. “They are of good quality.” Quantus wants to experiment with other exhibition ideas – Sandhu wants to build a wall of retro TVs, run a VR exhibition and find out holograms – but for now, TVs are doing the trick.
This is the thing about NFT art and how we show it. It is ultimately not a question of graphic fidelity or pixel density, but a question of purpose. Do you buy an NFT so you can watch JPEG all the time? Or is an NFT about your relationship with the artist, with other collectors, even with the underlying technology? And perhaps just as important, who gets to decide? With physical art, most of these decisions are made when art is made, and as it changes hands, it becomes impossible to track and control. With NFTs and the blockchain, tracking is the point; Artists can know exactly who owns their work, and collectors can know exactly who created it. So whose art is it really?
No one I spoke to claimed to know the answer. And almost every one of them said it’s part of the fun. NFTs have one specific use. They are an act of descent, a claim to ownership and authenticity that was never possible before. Artists will appreciate the technology for that. (And for the ridiculous sums of money, they make money on NFTs.) Now that prices and enthusiasm are falling and JPEG flippers and yacht club visitors are disappearing from the scene, the art audience is beginning to find out how the digital and physical art worlds interact. And exactly what resolution is required.
