Jack Butcher brings new riffs on popular checks NFTs to Christie’s
Jack Butcher, the artist behind Checks-the very successful open edition of the NFT collection that made waves earlier this year—has announced a prominent new twist on the project: a generative art collection with both physical and digital components that will be displayed and auctioned at Christie’s later this week.
The recently announced collection, Checks Elements, is a riff on Butcher’s past Checks project. The first series incorporated designs based on the Twitter verification symbol, and featured the tagline, “This artwork may or may not be notable.”
It came in the wake of Twitter owner Elon Musk decision to reserve hashtags – once coveted as a prominent mark and distributed to socially prominent Twitter users for free – for paying customers only.
Checks Elements expands on this concept by incorporating the motifs of earth, fire, water and air into 152 generative artworks that also feature Twitter branding. Each piece in the series comes with an NFT, designed by Butcher, as well as a matching hand-finished 30″ x 42″ monoprint of the same design constructed by master printer Jean Milant.
These 152 pieces are divided into six levels developed by the artist, each with a different level of rarity. The first layer in the collection, “Alpha”, includes four parts, one for each element. Three of these alpha elements – earth, air and water – will be auctioned tomorrow at Christie’s New York.
The other 149 pieces in the collection, including Alpha Element Fire, will be sold via online auction on May 24. A portion of the auction proceeds will be donated to St. Jude’s Research Hospital.
As with Butcher’s original Checks project, Checks Elements will also feature gamified elements that benefit collectors who have purchased previous works from Butcher and his creative agency, Visualize Value.
Owners of Checks, or of Openpen and VV 1/1s – two other Visualize Value projects – will receive specialized “Infinity Check” NFTs for each Checks Elements auction level they participate in. It is currently unclear what the future utility will be of that series will have. may be.
But this model – of NFTs begetting more NFTs, each new work promising to unlock even more utility and access at an unspecified date – was key to the success of Checks in February.
This project was open edition, meaning that an unlimited number of NFTs could be minted within a certain time frame. Recently, open edition NFT projects have leaned into gamified fundraising mechanics to encourage users to acquire as many as possible in the name of unlocking future benefits.
Checking NFTs originally minted for around $8 in January, then shot in the air at a price of over $4000 in ETH. An NFT sold for 52 ETHor about $84,000 worth at the beginning of February, and in total the project has provided almost 55 million dollars to date value of trading volume.
Since then, Butcher has allowed holders to trade in multiple editions for rarer renditions. The original issues have since settled at a floor price of 0.37 ETH, or around $670 at the time of writing.
