You may not know his name, but you have probably seen his work.
Alberto Mielgo has been producing digital art for films, television and commercials for many years. Famous works include an episode of Netflix LOVE DEATH AND ROBOTS (for which he and his 70-man team won several Emmies), music videos for The Gorillaz, and Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, where he collaborated with NFT digital-art-twist-high-art sensation Beeple.
Given the success of its former colleague and the high prices that NFTs regularly fetch, Mielgo could very well be the next commercially popular digital artist to use blockchain technology as a way to reach both a larger audience and the attention of the visual to draw art world.
Nerds take power
While saying that he will disclose more of his philosophy on the decline as the auction date approaches, Mielgo believes he sees the NFTs as a production and distribution medium as a natural fit for his work, as well as’ a democratization, wind. force.
“As a digital artist, I have always struggled to find the right format to showcase my work. And I felt that the ‘art elite’, which is about this 2%, or about 3% of the human population who have access to the big galleries or art fairs, that they never consider digital art as art – they always thought ‘Again for working on films and commercials. ”
The irony there, he says, is that digital artists largely like movies, commercials and popular culture – they are nerds. But now, “the nerds are taking power.”
‘The nerds think of crypto, about these abstract concepts that are so beautiful. I think only our generation, or people who have been working in technology or in the cloud for so long, we really get it. Most people need the physical thing, they need the item, for them it is almost impossible to think about owning something that is not physical. I think we’re moving to that world. ”
It’s a shift that the art world is struggling to keep up with, he said – after working for as long as he ignored it, they are now caught flat-footed. However, the new attempt to make room for his work does not come to him.
‘I think it definitely falls, but not myself, it’s rather the digital art world. I think Beeple entered the art world, but it was the people who already liked him who got him there. ”
He said he suspects it’s the “crypto people, the young generations, the new brain, the new thinkers … they’re like ‘hey this is OUR art’.”
Eventually Christie knocks on the door of the crypto and asks to play in ‘our’ world and not the other way around.
Melting faces
The business world can also catch up a bit, says Mielgo.
He deplores the current, “stupid” contractual culture around digital art, which requires artists to draw their “soul”. It is a landscape ripe for a revolution: the art world is ‘behind’, the large studios are ‘behind’ and NFTs offer an alternative, ‘parallel world’.
He tells a story of when he and Beeple worked on it Spider Man: Intro the Spider-Verse, where Beeple would submit fast, explosive, ‘super-psycadelic’ tracks with ‘hardcore techno’ music. Mielgo showed the tracks to Sony producers, rejoicing when their eyes popped and their jaws dropped.
“They could not even process,” he said laughing. “Everything was so fresh, like ‘oh my god.'”
It was a whole new world for the producers, “driving in limos to the studios”, “not making contact with the right people.”
NFTs are a way to do it from scratch, but only on a larger scale.
“It’s really a slap in the face, all these dinosaurs.”
The auction will take place on April 14 at Makersplace