Creative entrepreneurs Tim Harper and Murray Thom have joined forces with a handful of business heavyweights to form a roundtable of NFT merchandising in New Zealand.
Names like Dan Carter — All Blacks legend; Mike Heron QC – former Solicitor General of New Zealand; Scott McLiver — business and innovation consultant; and Craig Heatley are at the table, with James Blackie leading the charge as director of art.
Harper and Thom have expertise working with the creative industries spanning 15 years. They began with music, creating The Great New Zealand Song Book and moved onto chefs and food with The Great New Zealand Cookbook and The Great New Zealand Cake Book, producing a multitude of iterations in several countries. Three years ago, the pair really started honing their skills creatively with The Offering, which paired traditional hymns with New Zealand musicians to fundraise for the Salvation Army. The result was a beautiful, holistic product which raised half-a-million dollars for the charity.
It’s intimate, the work is about the relationship between the artist and his wife. It’s a love story.
Glorious is a creative NFT studio and marketplace that elevates and celebrates the beauty of art with authentic digital masterpieces by New Zealand artists. Glorious prides itself on being an ‘artist first’ organisation, currently boasting an impressive bank of established creators such as Six60, Lisa Reihana, SailGP, Neil Finn, Dan Carter, Karl Maughan, the Rita Angus Estate, and Dick Frizzell.
Creating a platform that hosts NFTs has huge appeal. Aside from the energy churn minting an NFT takes*, NFTs offer a stream of income for artists on the secondary market, which up until now, has proven impossible to police. That’s right, an artist can sell a work and 20 years later when the work resells, that artist gets paid, thanks to the blockchain and now Glorious.
With sustainability at the core of Glorious, the platform has been purpose-built on a proof of stake blockchain, Cennznet, a system that is 99% more energy efficient than early blockchains like Bitcoin.
Blockchain technology ensures that NFT works of art last forever as they suffer no degradation — and just like any other artform, they can be handed down through the generations.
So far you have sold NFTs by visual artists. How do you see sport being sold as an NFT?
Sport is full of agony and ecstasy. Photographers are always at sporting events and often create highly editorial works in the process. NFTs enable people to connect to and relive that game-changing moment and own it forever.
Your last drop was Rita Angus and next up is Gordon Walters. What is it about these iconic NZ artists that attracts you to create NFTs out of their work?
Immortalising content. We thought a good place to start was with our most famous and beloved artists. By working with the family estates, we can breathe new life into legacy masterpieces. Some of the best works never get seen, NFTs revive them for the next generation to enjoy.
What about Gordon Walters Work resonates with you most?
The work we have, ‘Maho’, was created by the artist around his love for his wife. It’s not been widely exhibited, the artist withdrew it from sale and gifted it to his wife, Margaret Orbell, a scholar in Māori poetry. It’s a minimal artwork, simple black and white, with two koru in the centre. It’s intimate, the work is about the relationship between the artist and his wife. It’s a love story.
Do you have any advice for the crypto curious, future NFT collector yet to dive down the rabbit hole?
Cryptocurrencies and NFTs are here to stay so don’t get left behind! There’s a whole new digital frontier out there and while it’s very, very early days, it is moving incredibly fast. I knew nothing about NFTs until I joined a Zoom call with my fellow co-Founders Scott McLiver, Murray Thom, and Dan Carter a year ago. But once you understand the underlying process, it’s an impossible technology to ignore. Especially the Smart Contract which enable artists to be paid a percentage on the secondary art market in perpetuity. I would encourage people to be curious, hold a healthy skepticism and test the waters by beginning a digital art collection. You won’t regret it.
Maho (1973) by Gordon Walters, is set to be released by the Gordon Walters Estate as a 12-edition NFT masterpiece series. The opening event will be hosted by auction house Art+Object on 7 April, with #1 going up for auction. Editions 2 to 10 will be available for purchase on the Glorious Marketplace from April 14. Glorious Founding Members will have access to the editions 2 to 10 presale. The remaining two digital masterpieces will be retained by the Walters Estate and Glorious Digital.
Visit glorious.digital to find out more.
*The environmental impact of NFTs sit front and centre for the art world, which has a long history of patrons with less than admirable attitudes to ecology. NFT and encryption certificate technology is improving daily, with options to offset carbon emissions on purchase constantly evolving.
