The Silent Auction
I’ve always been a big fan of Fubiz ever since I discovered it over a decade ago. It has posts about art, photography, and cool videos. I loved the site even though it was mainly in French. They have always done an amazing job of curating great visual content. I used to read them on Flipboard then I followed them on my RSS reader, and these days I see most of their posts through Instagram.
And so I was scrolling through Instagram last week and I came across this post from Fubiz.
At first I thought it was a person dancing in a furry costume, but then I realized that it was all computer generated and I was mesmerized by the swaying fur and how real it looked. I noticed that it was created by a guy name Kiyan Forootan and so I headed over to his Instagram page and I was blown away by all of his work. It combined human movement with all sorts of materials from fur to plastic to cloth. I immediately noticed that he had a Foundation page and so I clicked on the link and hoped that he still had some NFTs for sale. And lo and behold, he had “Furry Ghost” still for sale and the reserve was set at a reasonable price of 0.3 ETH. Before I knew it, I had put in a bid and started the auction.
You might think this is story of serendipity, finding a gem before anybody else noticed, but that is not the story I want to tell. I want to tell you the story of what I call the “silent auction”. Let me explain.
After I put in the bid, I started to read more about Kiyan Forootan. I probably should have done this before I put in the bid, but I was so excited that I did not do my usual due diligence. Maybe because I had found Kiyan through Fubiz, which is a trusted source for me. Maybe because I had noticed that Mari (yes, Mari aka MadMaraca, aka “Voxel Khalessi”) owned his piece “Lucid Dream”. But nonetheless, I started to search the web to learn more about Kiyan Foorootan.
Kiyan is a “3D artist and motion designer based in Vienna” according to his Instagram bio. He has a Twitter account and a Behance account. But what’s most interesting are his timelines. His last post on Behance was over a year and a half ago. His last post to Instagram was November 9, 2020, which is over 6 months ago. On Twitter, he actually posted just a few weeks ago about listing “Furry Ghost”.
But after that, Kiyan has tweeted nothing and liked nothing on Twitter. I found this a bit odd, but I didn’t think too much of it.
For every NFT I’ve bought, I’ve always had contact with the artist. Whether they tweeted about it, DM’d me directly to thank me for the bid and sometimes I’d reach out to the artist or tweet about it. I had put in a bid for a couple other pieces at the same time as I put in my bid for “Furry Ghost” and so I did not get a chance to reach out to him or tweet about it. The 24 hour auction time on Foundation elapsed and I became the new owner of “Furry Ghost”.
And through all of this Kiyan had been silent. No tweets. No DMs. No online activity. I hope he is OK and nothing bad has happened to him, but it was strangely quiet, especially since I had paid to settle the auction and the ETH should have arrived in his wallet. I say all of this not to pass any judgement on Kiyan, he may have honestly forgot or had other things going on in his life, and I truly love the piece and happy to have it in my collection. But I did miss the interaction and excitement when the artist finds out that a bid has been placed on his work. I missed getting to know the artist and talking to him about the piece. I missed seeing the community come out cheering for the artist’s success. I missed the social part of NFTs, which I think is the most under-appreciated part of the whole NFT phenomenon.
It did make me re-evaluate how much I valued the “life” of the artist versus just the art itself. I talked about this at the end of my post “The Job of the Collector”, where I said:
As I reflect on those letters that Jo had in her possession, the letters between her husband Theo and his brother Vincent, I think the modern equivalent of those letters is Twitter… Twitter has been a truly transformative technology for the NFT community and I believe it will be a crucial part in making NFTs a long-term success. It is a public record of all the correspondences between artists, collectors, and the general public. Anybody can read them and anybody can join a conversation... And these tweets from the NFT community are what collectors can use, just like Jo’s envelope of Vincent’s letters, to convince people to see what they see in all the artists they love.
I’m discovering that the “life” of the artist, their communication with the community and how they give back to the community, has much higher value to me than I realized and it does give me pause when I see an artist who has abandoned their Foundation page or has not engaged with the community. When I started, my mind was more about the art itself, whether I connected with it, does the piece move me, but now I think that is only part of the equation of how I value a piece of art. The art and the artist are even more fused together in this modern world of NFTs. It drives home the sentiment that I had mentioned in my post “The Price of NFTs”:
When I first got into NFTs, I was focused on the transaction, but what I found was that NFTs are actually another form of a social network, it gives a reason for people to connect in a meaningful way.
It will also be an interesting to watch what happens if and when the NFT community migrates to a different token like we are seeing with Tezos and hicetnunc.xyz. I have seen a couple artists with great works on their Foundation page, but they are no longer active on the site and have focused their social media and minting efforts on hicetnunc.xyz. If the artist no longer cares about their NFTs on the Ethereum blockchain, should collectors still care about those pieces? Should they only buy the pieces that are on the blockchain that an artist is active on or will those pieces have value anyways without the artist having to pay attention or promote them anymore? Or is this an opportunity to buy some pieces that have be neglected and if the artists returns to the platform, it will look like a total steal?
I don’t think the answer is clear yet and I imagine a lot will change in the coming months that will influence the answer, but my experience with the “silent auction” brought up a lot of questions for me and it is definitely causing me to evolve my approach as a collector. But one thing is for sure, I’ll be looking at the social part of the NFT experience much more closely from now on.
