APENFT Foundation and TRON have announced the winners of the Art Dream Fund’s inaugural open call. The prize invited artists to apply for a series of awards totalling USD$100,000 by creating digital artworks that explored their ‘Second Life’ in a digital parallel universe. This ‘Second Life’-themed open call received a variety of 2D and 3D, static and dynamic creations, from more than 500 artists and digital enthusiasts from around the world.
A panel of judges selected thirteen winners who will work with APENFT’s partner, LiveArt, to develop and mint their digital artworks. The works will be featured in a January 2022 exhibition co-curated by Sydney Xiong, art director of APENFT Foundation, and Marisa Kayyem, chief curator of LiveArt, and virtually in the APENFT Art Museum on Cryptovoxels, with the works available for purchase on the LiveArt platform.
‘A good artwork has two essential components,’ said Xiong. ‘First, a universal message – the work must have a clear and common language, so that the audience understands what you are trying to say. Good artworks can be understood across cultures. Second, artists’ own coding – in other words, their own symbols and styles. Entries that meet these two criteria are considered desirable by me.’
Kayyem commented: ‘LiveArt and Justin Sun [founder of TRON] share a common vision of bridging the traditional and digital artworlds, and APENFT is an ideal partner in that journey. ‘Second Life’ supports the growth of crypto-native NFT artists and LiveArt is thrilled to not only share our experience and technology, but to also expose their work to the traditional art market through our marketplace.’
The 13 winners of the Art Dream Fund’s 2021 open call are as follows:
Grand Prize Award (x1)
Best Creativity Awards (x4)
Best Category Awards (x8)
About the Art Dream Fund
The Art Dream Fund is committed to giving traditional artists a stake in NFTs and the blockchain world by leveraging the experience of APENFT Foundation and TRON in technology, the market and industry, and policy analysis. By doing so, it aims to reshape the existing art market to jointly create a new culture and community where fresh voices can be heard. As the first foundation in the world whose collections straddle physical and digital NFT artworks, APENFT aims to build a platform for multi-disciplinary art practices to be developed, displayed, and spread by turning the spotlight on the intersections of reality, the virtual world, and social context. Moving forwards, the Art Dream Fund will offer a wide variety of support programmes such as open calls for musical and architectural works and artist-in-residence programmes to attract younger creators.
About APENFT
Officially registered in Singapore on 29 March 2021, APENFT is backed by the underlying technology of blockchains Ethereum and TRON with support from the world’s largest distributed storage system Bittorrent File System (BTFS) to deliver its mission of facilitating the creator economy while catalyzing its financial and cultural inclusion in the metaverse and the integration of the virtual and real worlds. APENFT’s collections of modern and contemporary art include key works by Picasso, Warhol, Giacometti and emerging crypto-artists Beeple, Pak, FEWOCiOUS, Mitchell F. Chan, which are made available for the entire community through a series of curated online exhibitions in the metaverse. APENFT Foundation also partners with established art institutions such as Christie’s and Sotheby’s; recently, it successfully sponsored the fourth annual ‘Art + Tech Art Technology Summit: NFTs and the Future’’ in New York, receiving global media coverage. As the leading tech-driven art foundation, APENFT aims to drive high-quality traffic to support the development of the decentralised metaverse’s ecosystem.
About LiveArt
LiveArt is the global fine art marketplace that puts collectors and artists in control by providing the necessary data, insight and opportunity to buy or sell works of art without relying on traditional intermediaries. LiveArt was established by a team of art market insiders and tech innovators who have developed proprietary technologies to support the unique needs of the artworld. LiveArt comprises three integrated components: an AI-powered comprehensive data solution that provides a key destination for art market data and analysis, live auction streaming, real-time and historic pricing information, detailed analysis of artist and market trends, and financial and cultural context; a digital peer-to-peer marketplace that offers discretion, allowing users to determine how much information about their identity and works of art is disclosed; and an end-to-end solution for minting and selling NFTs.
