Sarah Meyohas is a Franco-American painter. Her works tell about the complexities of technology and labor. A salon dedicated to the power of NFT campaigns during Art Basel Miami Beach with the support of Metaversal, the NFT holding company where Sarah Meyohas is now an artist.
Sarah Meyohas has plenty of information to share. She predicted how blockchain technologies would integrate with the art world when in 2015, five months before the birth of Ethereum (the cryptocurrency that NFTs are commonly minted in), she launched Bitcoin.
Sarah Meyohas initially conceived of BitchCoin as a specialized cryptocurrency that would allow collectors to invest in an artist rather than a specific piece of art. At the beginning of its existence, one BitchCoin cost $ 100 and bought the investor 25 square inches of Sarah Meyohas footprint. To buy one full print, someone has to buy 25 BitchCoins.
Sarah Meyohas grew up in a family working in finance. She studied at the prestigious Wharton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania. That might explain how she was able to predict how willingly collectors would buy art that they couldn’t touch or even watch.
In fact, you often hear about collectors and investors these days buying newly released NFTs so quickly that the image can`t be even loaded by the time they purchase it.
In 2017, Sarah Meyohas used the proceeds from the sale of BitchCoin to implement her Cloud of Petals work. For this piece of art, she hired 16 male workers to pick, preserve and photograph 100,000 flower petals. These petals had to be registered in a database that the AI program would use to invent new unique petals.
In a kind of commentary about the impact of automation on aesthetics, Sarah Meyohas asked each worker to put aside one petal for the rose they consider to be the most beautiful. 3291 of these petals were exhibited at the 2017 Red Bull Arts show in New York.
Six years after Sarah Meyohas launched BitchCoin, the rest of the world realized the economic potential of NFT. Sarah Meyohas first issued 200 BitchCoins. But when the market bounced, it transferred BitchCoin to Ethereum and released 3,291 new BitchCoins with “Backed by Petal” written on the back. In May, 480 newly minted BitchCoins were sold at Philips auction for nearly $ 400,000.
The rest of the BitchCoins were available for sale on the NFT OpenSea trading platform. At Art Basel Miami Beach, Sarah Meyohas spoke with various NFT experts to learn how artists can leverage the power of cryptocurrency.
The show consisted of three short panels featuring crypto experts such as Alex Zhang, Mayor of Friends with Benefits, a social club whose members are to be FWB coin holders, and Lindsay Howard, Community Leader at the NFT Platform Foundation.
