“I’m very sorry”: Takashi Murakami apologizes to his crypto investors on Twitter as NFT prices fall.
Takashi Murakami is one of the few fine artists who managed to make a successful crossover to the NFT room.
He was first inspired to launch a collection in the spring of 2021, after seeing Christie’s auction of a Beeple NFT for $ 69 million in crypto. The event started a global NFT craze, and the next few months were the best time to launch an NFT collection, for those who jumped at the right time.
Unfortunately, Murakami’s timing was terrible, and he completely missed the NFT boom. After spending a year fine-tuning the technical details of the project, he launched it just before the 2022 cryptocurrency.
On June 8, a seemingly discouraged Murakami apologized on Twitter: “Dear proprietors of http://Murakami.Flowers, I appreciate your continued support, even though the project’s floor price and transaction prices remain stagnant. I am very sorry,” he said.
The cheapest Murakami.Flower NFT is now 2 ETH ($ 2200, at current value) at Open sea. During a false start over a year ago, he received a bid of upwards of $ 260,000. That was when he decided to withdraw the project and think a little more about things.
Instead of mocking him for the long delay in launching the project or the price drop, his fans stood by his side. A Twitter user wrote: “do not apologize for how the market behaves, not in your control.”
“It’s not your art or something you’ve done. It’s the market. Nothing to be sorry about! Just keep going with you! “Another so.
A fan rude wrote: «Please give it another 30 years. I want to disappear from this world, and the true value of my NFT project will be clear. “
Murakami did not respond to a request for comment from Artnet News.
A gallery owner watches the opening of Takashi Murakami’s “An Arrow Through History”. With permission from the artist and Gagosian. Photo: Yvonne Tnt.
The Japanese artist launched his pixilated flower NFTs to a patiently awaited base of fans last month. The series debuted with an average price of 9.89 ETH. But the NFT market cooled, and the crypto sky became already darker.
In early May became Wall Street Journal reported The NFT market had flattened, and by the beginning of June, Bitcoin had lost over 60 percent of its value from its record in November, pulling down the rest of the crypto and NFT markets along with it.
Murakami’s slack pace was a big part of the problem. A few weeks after he first announced his NFT project dropped 108 NFTs– of a collection of 11,664 pixelated flowers, represented by tokens on the Ethereum blockchain – on OpenSea.
“I grope in the dark, so I’m sure I’ll make a lot of mistakes, but please be patient,” wrote prophetically on Instagram at the time.
Things looked good. The first “Murakami.Flowers” NFT, titled # 0000 Murakami.Blomst immediately drew a bid at 144 ethers, or about $ 260,395.
But instead of staying the course, Murakami got cold feet. Less than two weeks later, the artist pulled the entry and announced that he would postpone the long-awaited NFT project.
He wanted to better understand the technology. Instead of relying on OpenSea to list his work, he wanted to create his own smart contract to maintain the project’s independence in the future.
He also wanted to focus on Web 3.0. “It took me a long time to get this part installed in my mind,” he told Artnet News last month.
The delay cost him at a time when he could not save it: the NFT project provided a financial opportunity for Murakami, who was comes after a bad year. Covid had stranded him in Japan through 2020. In July of that year, he declared that his company, Kaikai Kiki, was on the verge of bankruptcy. A long-planned gallery show was postponed, along with a museum show. His film, Jellyfish Eye Part 2: Mahashankhwas canceled.
Then things started to look up for a while. In November, Murakami teamed up with RTFKT to release a series of 20,000 3D profile pictures called Clone X at a price of 2 ETH each (approximately $ 4,000) which quickly sold out. In mid-May, the total turnover was 98,000 ETH, or $ 41 million, with the bottom price at 13.49 ETH ($ 28,134 at the time). Today, the floor price is 8.98 ETH ($ 11,038).
Following the successful collaboration, Murakami finally announced the release of Murakami.Flowers in May 2022. The project even inspired part of his re-planned show at Gagosian, where he presented physical paintings and sculptures based on his Murakami.Flowers and Clone X NFT series.
And despite the crash, Murakami seems committed to staying in the game. On June 14, he released a new line of NFTs called Lucky Cat Coin Bank, pixelated versions of the popular Japanese Maneki-neko figure, designed to bring good luck to the owner. The floor price is currently 0.74 ETH ($ 1,111).
If Murakami has learned any valuable lessons from all of this, it may be that the whole crypto area is a Jenga stack of interconnected time bombs. Enter at your own risk.
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