Twobadour Paanar aka Anand Venkateswaran describes himself as the steward of Metapurse who bought Beeple’s First 5000 days, a digital NFT-based artwork for $69 Million
Two immigrants from Tamil Nadu took the world of digital art by storm when they bought Beeple’s First 5000 days, a digital NFT-based artwork for $69 million, making it the most expensive NFT (non-fungible token) ever sold.
They revealed their identities last week. Metakovan and Twobadour Paanar, who run the Singapore-based crypto fund Metapurse, are Vignesh Sundaresan, a serial crypto entrepreneur and Anand Venkateswaran, who transitioned from the world of media and communications to crypto and NFTs. Twobadour Paanar aka Anand, who describes himself as the steward of Metapurse, spoke to Moneycontrol’s Chandra R Srikanth on the Beeple purchase, the disruption in digital art and the future of cryptocurrencies in India.
Tell us about how the last week has been ever since the big reveal? What has changed for you and Vignesh?
It’s really been very surreal. I mean, you don’t go planning to be a part of history, you’re more focussed on trying to get things done. The weeks preceding the Christie’s sale, Vignesh was extremely focussed on making sure we had the processes in place, that we had the requisite credit limit with Christie's because we're not used to that kind of a process when it comes to auctions in the crypto space.
There's nobody telling us how much you can spend, or what's your limit, and so on and so forth. But the Christie's it's very relationship-based, right? That itself is a weird thing for crypto natives. We don't like that amount of human interaction.
It's been a process of trying to come to terms with what happened, rather than any grand plans of what to do next, or what's happening here, we're just trying to come to terms with the fact that this is now the third most expensive piece ever put out by a living artist, and that is the highest ever sole NFT by a massive margin.
But the numbers apart, it's extremely culturally significant, because in one fell swoop, it upended a lot of closely held notions about high art, about who can be a tastemaker in this world, about what art is. Traditionally, digital art, for the longest time, has not been considered art at all.
So, I think in one sense we upended a lot of these closely held notions and beliefs, and we're still trying to articulate it to ourselves, and also come to terms with it with the rest of the world.
Does it worry you and Vignesh? Because every person asks you the same question- hey why did you spend $69 million to buy a JPEG image? So, do you guys have second thoughts sometimes on the price?
We have no second thoughts at all. In fact, like, like we've said, quite often, considering the significance of what has happened and what this piece itself represents, we got it for a steal. Yes, it is a JPEG. We would have been disappointed if it was in any other format.
The way we engage with art has been very unimaginative, right? So far, you either buy a work of art and flip it for a higher price or two, you buy a really expensive work of art and then you store it away, which is what happens to over 80% of the highest valued art on the planet right now. And then there is this third way of engaging art, which has traditionally been the way that we engage with art historically in temples in India, in ancient Rome, or an ancient civilization, right? That stopped being sustainable at some point.
What NFT enables is to open up for all of the people to experience and explore without losing any of its value. That's what this represents. It's like distributing prints of the Mona Lisa, right?
You can make a million prints but the original is still the original. The original is still the original and we intend to create a massive monument to this particular piece itself, both in the Metaverse and probably real-world replicas as well. That's the plan for now.
The other thing is the artwork itself. If you actually break this down and go through the images that make up the 5000, a lot of the images aren’t in good taste. An art site said they won’t stand the test of time. Did you guys actually go through each of the 5,000 images or was the effort to draw one artwork a day more valuable than the art itself?
Both. What was most important to us out of this is that this piece represents the only thing that's not hackable in our digital world, and that is time. It represents an almost spiritual level of commitment of one artist, to this particular effort, right to put forth one work of art every day without fail, and that includes his good days and bad days, his sick days, his empty days,, he put out a work of art in 20 minutes, on one day, when his wife was in labor, he didn't miss any day. So it compresses, you know, half a lifetime of experiences.
If you start looking at these images from the top left, the first image is pretty crap. It's really horrible, you know, in all senses, and then you graduate all the way down the bottom right. And in the middle, you see these flashes of brilliance. I think. grotesqueness has been traditionally a part of even high art. What Beeple has said about himself is that he's a satirist, at the end of the day. There are artists who are simply conduits to the times we live in, and let's face it, these are not very pleasant times.
What has the response been from crypto folks in India after the reveal? Because right now, there is a lot of uncertainty on the way forward for crypto in India- on whether it will be allowed as an asset class or banned.
It is hard to come to terms with something like this with some sort of a cohesive policy that covers, you know, millions and millions of people. So, I think it is going to take time, but at the end of the day, India is an ambitious country. And I have a lot of faith in that ambition. Because what crypto represents today is not just a cutting-edge technology alone.
India has a large bunch of blockchain developers, this is an opportunity to stay ahead of the curve, and spark an environment of entrepreneurship out of India, rather than being relegated to a back-office function. It opens up global capital for MSMEs. So, we need to open up massive global capital and crypto can enable that.
We believe that being boxed in, as the Indians who did this for India, would be detrimental to the costs in the long run, rather to be seen as those tastemakers who open up the NFT space who open up a new world for creators without boundaries.
Right, there is also talk of how more and more Indian artists are now keen to cash in on the NFT boom. Are you seeing more interest?Yeah, we do have quite a few Indian artists in the collection, there is a vibrant and growing community of Indian artists in the NFT space.
So, what’s next for you and Vignesh?
This particular piece, Beeple 5000, deserves a monument of its own. We will focus on that and sort of make sure we do that justice. But as for the next big thing, I think the real NFT wave is going to be one where you create experiences around the NFTs and not just acquire them. The true explosion will happen even when these virtual worlds start to expand in scope.
And, what do you say to critics? Michael Burry of Big Short fame has a quote screenshot that says NFTs exist so that the crypto grifters can have a new kind of magic bean to sell for actual money, and pretend they are not selling magic beans. There is a new fad every few years- from Bitcoin to ICOs to DeFi to now NFTs.
Despite criticisms, each of these has become a real thing and none of them is, is dead, right? It's fine. Warren Buffet doesn't like Bitcoin. I don't think Bitcoin really cares about it. In a sense, they just keep on evolving. The crypto cycle is extremely quick, which means that tany systemic malaise will not last very long.
