Online art gallery Saatchi Art debuts its landmark NFT collection

Leading online gallery Saatchi Art has opened reservations for its debut NFT collection ‘The Other Avatars’.

Available to the public on January 9, the non-fungible token collection features more than 2,000 ‘non-generative art avatars’ which draw inspiration from artists like Vincent van Gogh and creative thinkers whose approaches are “ahead of their time”.

More than 150 global artists, who have contributed to over $5m in Collective Sales on Saatchi Art, were hand-selected by a curation team to design the series of “handmade, originally-designed, and stylistically-varied avatars”.

Each artist will create 10-20 unique avatar artworks – many of which are digital creations developed from physical artworks.

The avatars will also feature 11 ‘predefined’ traits that the artists will use to create each of their own unique Van Gogh-inspired artwork.

Hosted on the Ethereum blockchain, interested collectors can participate in the live sale of this collection by paying a fixed price of 0.1 ETH, plus Ethereum gas fees, to receive one of a randomly-assigned NFT from the collection.

The series of avatars will then be made available on NFT marketplaces such as OpenSea. Also, in a similar fashion to physical artwork sales on Saatchi Art, artists will earn 65% on the sale of their avatars, which will also extend to royalties earned from secondary sales.

Additionally, Saatchi Art will look to partially mitigate the environmental impact of the project by calculating CO2 emissions from ‘The Other Avatars‘ and then explore ways to reduce the carbon footprint.

The gallery commented on the role of NFTs in the modern art world, saying “while many think NFTs are a passing fad to be ignored, others – including the team at Saatchi Art – believe they will play a major role in the future of art”.