Jonathan Thunder's Latest NFT Auction Drop Starts Wednesday

One of the surprising new developments of the past year has been the growth of the NFT market. NFT is short for Non-Fungible Token. Fungible is a legal term defined this way: (of goods contracted for without an individual specimen being specified) able to replace or be replaced by another identical item; mutually interchangeable. Fungible is not a new term, but NFTs are a new craze.

What it means is that it is unique and cannot be replaced with something else. An example would be a bitcoin. If you trade one for another you have the same thing. It is not unique. It's fungible. The Mona Lisa, on the other hand, is unique. The sheet of paper in which Dylan wrote the original lyrics to "Desolation Row" is unique. These are non-fungible.

Much of what's being sold are digital goods, like Jack Dorsey's first Tweet, which sold for near three million dollars.

According to the Verge, where I'm getting this info from, the real craze right now involves using the current blockchain technology to sell art. Artists getting into NFTs appreciate the new outlet for their creative expressions. Art buyers enjoy supporting artists. Some art buyers do so for the profit they anticipate when something they own appreciates in value. Others for the gratification of owning a piece of work they admire and appreciate for its own sake.

Essentially, each NFT holds a unique spot on the blockchain. For reasons I don't understand very well, most NFTs are part of the Ethereum crypto blockchain. People who participate in this market as buyers or sellers tend to work through brokers who run auctions. For example, Nifty Gateway is where you will find Jonathan Thunder's next NFT drop. In fact, the galleries at Nifty Gateway will likely be an eye-popping, eye-opening introduction to a whole new realm that we college art students of the 70s could not possibly have imagined. 

I've been following Jonathan Thunder's career now for five years since first writing about him in 2016. His cred has been well established, having been a featured artist in our three leading galleries, the Tweed Museum of Art, Joseph Nease Gallery and the Duluth Art Institute. Here are notes from a 2017 artist talk he gave at the DAI.

It was this past Saturday that I ran into Jonathan Thunder at a local outdoor market where he shared a little about tomorrow's drop at Nifty Gateway. Jonathan's drop will be 6:30 p.m. This is his second drop and we're very much looking forward to it.

To see more visit thunderfineart.com