Jack Butcher, the artist behind Checks—the very successful open-edition NFT collection that made waves earlier this year—announcing a prominent new twist to the project: a generative art collection featuring physical and digital components that will be exhibited and auctioned at Christie’s later this week.
The newly announced collection, Checks Elements, is a riff on Butcher’s past Checks project. That first series included designs based on Twitter’s verification symbol, and featured the tagline, “This artwork may or may not be unique.”
It came after Twitter owner Elon Musk decision to reserve checkmarks—once coveted as a mark of prominence and distributed to prominent Twitter users for free—only for paying customers.
Elements of Check illustrates that concept by incorporating the motifs of earth, fire, water, and air into 152 generative art pieces featuring Twitter checkmarks. Each piece in the series comes with an NFT, designed by Butcher, as well as a matching hand-finished 30″ x 42″ monoprint of the same design created by master printmaker Jean Milant.
Those 152 pieces are divided into six levels created by the artist, each with a different level of rarity. The first tier of the collection, “Alpha,” includes four pieces, one for each element. Three of the Alpha Elements—Earth, Air, and Water—will be auctioned tomorrow at Christie’s New York.
The 149 other pieces in the collection, including the Alpha Element Fire, will be sold through an online auction on May 24. A portion of the auction proceeds will be donated to St. Jude’s Research Hospital.
Like Butcher’s original Checks project, Check Elements will also feature gamified elements that will benefit collectors who have purchased previous works from Butcher and his creative agency, Visualize Value.
Owners of Checks, or Openpen and VV 1/1’s—two other Visualize Value projects—will receive special “Infinity Check” NFTs for each level of the Checks Elements auction they participate in. It is not yet clear what the future use of the series might be.
That model, however—with NFTs begetting more NFTs, and each new work promising to unlock more functionality and access at an unspecified date—is the key to the success of the Check in February.
That project is open edition, meaning an unlimited number of NFTs can be used at a certain time. Recently, open edition NFT projects rely on gamified collection mechanics to encourage users to scoop up as many as possible in the name of unlocking future benefits.
NFT checks were originally made for around $8 in January, then burst at a price of over $4,000 in ETH. An NFT sold for 52 ETHor about $84,000 worth in early February, and overall the project is paying off almost $55 million to date amount of trading volume.
Since then, Butcher has allowed holders to sell multiple editions for more unique renderings. The original editions have since settled at a floor price of 0.37 ETH, or about $670 as of writing.
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