It’s a meme now considered an icon of the 21st century by the internet community, it has sold for more than $600,000; the video of a Ghanaian group dancing while carrying a coffin, for more than a million dollars, and the meme of a girl looking mischievous with a house on fire behind her, for almost $500,000.
The creator of Nyan cat, Chris Torres, tells EFE that he specialized in the “economy of memes” and that he is now helping the creators of this “new digital renaissance” to monetize the art that has gone viral on social networks. . “I have been able to help many meme creators sell their art in non-expendable tokens (NFT)“.
Among the memes it has helped are Keyboard Cat -a video that went viral in 2007 of a cat dressed in a shirt playing the piano-, Grumpy Cat -a cat with dwarfism who seems to be sad and who even starred in a movie with Aubrey Plaza in 2014- or Disaster Girl -meme of a girl with a house on fire in the background-.
“I also helped Dancing Coffin (a Ghanaian group that went viral in 2020 for dancing while carrying a coffin. It was great to be able to help them and the Ethereum (a type of cryptocurrency) NFT digital artist community was able to give them value. That NFT was It sold for more than 1,040,000 dollars, and they donated half,” says the 36-year-old artist.
The renaissance of digital art
Torres describes the moment that digital artists are experiencing as “a new renaissance” in which creators can manage to monetize their work regardless of whether they are already circulating on the internet.
“I used to live in an ecosystem where I almost begged people to buy me things. I was like, ‘Hey, I can draw you something for $20,'” he says. And the popularity of some of these memes at auctions, In an ever-changing market for digital collectibles, it has led investors to reconsider the true value of the artwork.
Not only has the way of selling digital art changed, the meme culture has also evolved. “Now memes can be used for much more than just humor. You can use it as a communication tool; for example, I find out about the news through memes, I don’t have a television”stands out.
Nyan Cat, an heirloom
A decade in the internet world is enough time for the cat Torres created on April 1, 2011 via streaming to now be considered “an heirloom” by collectors.
At the time, when she shared the GIF of her curious cat on the networks, she received a hundred emails asking about her “crazy” creation, but a couple of days later, when an Internet user uploaded her drawing of the cat to YouTube with music hyper catchy and named the animal Nyan (in Japanese, the onomatopoeia “meow”), the drawing went viral. Today it has almost 200 million views and there are 24-hour videos of the cat drawing repeated thousands and thousands of times.
How to monetize virality
And despite the virality, these videos did not give him money. It was not until 2020, when Torres lost his job as a computer scientist due to the pandemic, that the artist decided to auction off a file of the Nyan Cat.
“I was going to sell it very cheap, the starting price of it was 1 Ethereum, which at that time was about 1,500 dollars. I thought, ‘Maybe I’ll get 5 or 10 Ethereum.’ But when the auction started he immediately received offers. He raised au$20,000 the first hour”, recalls Torres excitedly.
The auction led to a “bidding war” and the amount rose to 300 Ethereum, more than $600,000 then, according to Torres, or $535,284 worth of the cryptocurrency on Friday, June 3.
Since Torres “joined the NFT world” he has been able to dedicate himself totally to art and has redesigned his cosmic cat for collaborations with renowned artists such as rapper Snoop Dogg -in this case the cat is a dog with gold chains- or the DJ Steve Aok, with the cat sporting a long mane and headphones.
Source: Ambito
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