The Pomp Podcast - #788 World Class Artist Joins the NFT Space w/ Paul Gerben

Starting point is 00:00:00 what's up everyone this is anthony pompliano most of you know me as pomp you're listening to the pomp podcast simply the best podcast out there now let's kick this thing off paul gerben is a world-class artist he's made some of the world famous statues and various pieces of art everyone from billionaires to everyday people spend years trying to find some of his amazing art he's got a brand new nft project and so we've got a conversation with paul and also the team over at SuperRare. And ultimately, the goal of this conversation is to highlight why somebody like this, like Paul, a world-class artist, will be going into the NFT market and how exactly it works for them. Hope you enjoyed this conversation. But before we get into it, I want to first talk

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Starting point is 00:04:12 specific inducement to make a particular investment or follow a particular strategy, but only as an expression of his personal opinion. This podcast is for informational purposes only. All right, guys. Bang, bang. I've got both John and Paul here with me. I'm super excited about this. This is some crazy, crazy stuff going on in the NFT world. So John, let's start with you in SuperRare. Obviously, NFTs have taken the world by storm. Help me understand how you guys think about NFTs. Is this a flash in the pan? Is this going to be sustainable? And just what do you think about the overall market and kind of how popular it's gotten so quickly? Yeah, absolutely. So I definitely don't think it's a flash in the pan. We started SuperRare four years ago

Starting point is 00:04:50 as an experiment. And here we are four years later, we hit over $200 million in sales just in 2021. And for context for folks, we did 90 K in sales in 2018. So the market's been exploding. Uh, you got saw the bees pace, like the best galleries in the world getting into this space. And, um, no, it's a, we're still at the beginning. All right. Talk to me about super rare itself. So you guys built this, uh, it's obviously grown into one of the leading platforms in the industry. Uh, walk me through like, what is the product suite provide? What are you guys seeing from a customer standpoint in the behaviors over the last couple of months yeah so from the beginning we wanted to tailor the

Starting point is 00:05:30 experience right nfts can be a lot of things you know there's domain names vr games all sorts of things uh what was nearest and dearest to our hearts was art so we wanted to focus on digital art and we built the product suite accordingly so we started with uh minting tools for artists and a secondary market for artists as well um and kind of we we're now transitioning to also focus on collector tools so kind of like managing your collection if you want to throw your art up on on your TV, show off to your family when they're at your house for Christmas. Um, you were, we're building tools there as well. And we're kind of, what we think about is like, what is the operating system for, you know, curating, collecting, enjoying a digital art meet. And so that's

Starting point is 00:06:10 kind of like the long-term goal is really building the entire tool set to participate in this new market. How big is the platform? Like, are there any metrics that you guys share publicly in terms of number of users, volume, any of that type of stuff? Yeah, absolutely. So we got about 200,000 registered users. Most of those folks are kind of like browsing and engaging with the community. We have about 10,000 collectors. And, you know, part of that is, you know, we're sort of like the top end of the market. So if you look at the numbers for December, the average price point for a piece of art on SuperRare right now is about $100,000. And, you know, we're doing about $40,000 a month in volume. Got it. Or 40 million. Sorry. Bigger number. It's a couple more zeros.

Starting point is 00:06:52 Awesome. All right. So you guys got this great platform. Obviously, NFTs are big. They're getting bigger. And what's so fascinating to me is there's tons of what I'll call digitally native artists. These are people who were born on the Internet, grew their platforms on the Internet. And in some cases, the first time they created art was for NFTs. right and that's an amazing world there's some amazing artists there uh obviously that have become very popular and the sales speak for themselves but what is more fascinating to me is folks like paul who have this legacy reputation this entire portfolio has been making art for literally years and years and years so paul walk us through exactly kind of your journey from as an artist before you get into any of the nft stuff i don't think that people really quite understand just how prolific your work has been over the years uh well you know it's funny i i uh during high school i'd gone taking college summers at like risdy uh road on school design and pratt

Starting point is 00:07:45 and you know definitely was excited about being an artist i had a really encouraging mom who was super creative and started with comic books and kind of goofy shit and then uh started taking fine art classes uh in the summers like i said summer programs and then by the time i got to college my freshman year um i had already gone through all these foundation programs and you I really, my mother really didn't have the money for school and I wound up just dropping out of college my freshman year. But as a result, funny enough, I used to cut hair for kids in high school. And when I got to college, I started cutting hair for seniors and juniors that were graph designers, industrial designers and jobs and things I never even knew existed. And

Starting point is 00:08:24 in exchange, they would give me lessons. They'd give me a graph design lesson or they'd give me industrial design lesson. And I would sneak into the computer room, even though I dropped out freshman year and i started playing on the computer on a mac like stretching typography and you know doing things with graphics that i didn't even know was possible traditionally even though i had learned basic traditional graphics and i was completely hooked from 18 on like with the technology i um basically taught myself graph design did graph design dropped out as like i said freshman year and started doing graph design jobs you know when i was 19 20 21 so by the time all the kids that I graduated from college, you know, who had graduated in my class, I had already

Starting point is 00:09:03 done 50 jobs and fucked up probably 48 of them. But at least I, you know, basically learned all the real world, I guess, skills in branding and design. And again, I was still drawing and painting and kind of doing a little bit of everything, photography. And I would take a random class, photography class at one school or a self-screen class at another. I mean, I just took a class at Pratt last year and I'm 52, you know, I'm still always teaching myself other skill sets just because I love it. And it's so much fun to me. It's, you know, just to be creative and live through being creative to me is like a dream come true considering I've been working since I'm 14, delivering Chinese food, scooping ice cream, parking cars. And I love all those jobs, but

Starting point is 00:09:44 you know, to be able to live and make a living, just making stuff is I think every creative kid's fantasy so your your art is uh many people will hear this and they'll be like okay cool he creates art and i'm like no no no listen he creates art i've been to the studio i've seen it all it is incredible art what's the craziest piece that you've made or what's the thing that you've sold for the most amount of money um probably my love sculptures i have a 3 000 pound sculpture being delivered this week you know i've sold i've sold one for over a million already um i'm probably going to put out one of them as an nft a one-on-one on super rare um that comes with an actual animated nft showing it in a property or some kind of interesting location you know whether it's a park

Starting point is 00:10:28 or um and i think the craziest thing i did though is uh over covid i got really ambitious and i wanted to go larger scale like jeff coons or uh even architects like the bean in chicago or the vessel in hudson yards and i took my love sculpture and i decided to design a 64 foot and an 80 foot building version of it um three floors with an architect had it fully rendered super high resolution to the point where it almost looks realistic and i was pitching it to some of the teams to you know robert craft who owns the patriots i had done a mets building same thing and tried to pitch it to steve cohen and trying to get one of these things actually physically built outside of a um a stadium and what i realized is at the same time that this nft

Starting point is 00:11:10 T craze took off. I realized the animation is so beautiful. It could be my biggest NFT one of one release for sure. And it's something I wanted to save as I slowly rolled out all my work into the NFT space. Got it. And so when you start to think about the NFTs, right, you come from the legacy art market. Uh, you've had a tremendous success there. What is it about the NFTs that is so interesting to you? Like why, why is this the thing that now you want to focus on? I think for multiple reasons. I think one, I made some success for myself in the art business by myself. And to be honest, it's kind of boring celebrating by yourself. I'm a real collaborator. So now I have two full-time and two part-time animators who I really love and I'm enjoying mentoring them. They're amazing human beings and they're so creative. And every day they thank me for giving them this opportunity. But truthfully, every day, I'm equally as thankful for their ability, skills, energy, enthusiasm. And I've probably hired 100 people in my life.

Starting point is 00:12:08 These are the hardest working, nice, most creative, talented people I've ever hired. And they're kids. They're young and they're enthusiastic. So it's really exciting to, you know, kind of create with younger people who have that same energy that you do. Even if they're 20 years younger, they have the same spirit and creative passion that I do. All right. now super rare itself there's a ton of different platforms you could go to what is it about super rare that's got you so excited why are you choosing to work with them multiple reasons one

Starting point is 00:12:37 um you know to me it was it was like between all the big platforms um i'm a big people person i want to work people that i really like who are really genuine and super down to earth and after talking to the ceos and owners of a bunch of the big platforms i just found john was just incredible and uh david is head curator and just everyone on his team that i've met and spoke to have been just incredible, incredibly responsive, collaborative, and just really warm, genuine down-to-earth people. And for me, that's everything, especially during COVID. I think, you know, everyone's had a lot of mental health issues and stress, anxiety, including myself. And to work with people that I really enjoy working with every day has really rebuilt

Starting point is 00:13:19 my spirit and energy back. And I think it's been extremely helpful, you know, during this two-year pandemic. Now, John, when we start to see folks like Paul getting into the game, right? This isn't the kind of digitally native artist. This is somebody who comes and had a ton of success in the legacy art market. What does that tell you about the market? Is that just a sign of the maturation? Is that a sign that like every artist is going to come into NFTs? Like how do you think about that as a data point as this industry continues to mature? Yeah, I definitely think it's a sign that every artist is going to come into the space. I think one of the most exciting parts about nfts like in a sort of like philosophical level is if you think about

Starting point is 00:13:56 what's happening is artists around the world are adding their art to a shared global registry of artworks like right now all the art in the world is stored like the registration of it is stored in these proprietary databases it's super hard to get to it's like you know proprietary databases sort of like a business model like from the you know early 80s and so like if you have the opportunity to add your creativity to kind of like this global registry of like the human race's creativity um you know that's very exciting in and of itself and so i think like there are these structural problems with how the existing art market works and nfts are a very simple elegant solution uh that solves a lot of those got it and now when you start to look at something uh for

Starting point is 00:14:41 both of you right one of the things that's uh really interesting to me is this idea that the nft provides the monetization of the secondary market so for those that don't know an nft basically allows for an artist to sell the first time right the primary sale uh so let's say that paul sells a piece for a hundred dollars he makes a hundred dollars uh minus whatever fees etc on that sale but then if the recipient of that piece of art turns around and sells it to somebody else let's say for two hundred dollars in the legacy art market paul makes nothing there's just hey look somebody sold my piece of art to somebody else that's great you know i'm becoming more maybe a more popular artist. Somebody's collecting my art, all that type of stuff.

Starting point is 00:15:15 But with NFTs, now we have technology where Paul can actually monetize that secondary market sale, that $200 kind of second sale. So Paul, maybe I'll start with you. Like, how do you look at that in terms of how that changes the economics of art? Does that actually make you change the way that you create art? Are there different things that you'll do? Or is this just a nice kind of icing on the cake? You're just going to create the art that you create. And this just happens to be, you know, some additional revenue that you'll get from it. No, I think it's actually amazing for multiple reasons i think it's amazing for the fact that um you know as a service to collectors a lot of artists do what's called cash grabs or they'll do large volumes of pieces and

Starting point is 00:15:48 i've tried to do everything in additions under 40 even in the physical art world but the fact that you can uh the harder you work and the more strategic you are and the better you do in the market the more you can make your collectors and the more you'll make yourself it's a real amazing win-win-win opportunity i think um that's what makes it such a beautiful thing I'm working on a whole bunch of charity projects as well. And the fact that you can divide up money between multiple parties, between charities, organizations, and then again, even in the secondary market, the better they do, everyone is reaping the reward of it, which doesn't happen anywhere in the traditional art market.

Starting point is 00:16:23 Yeah. John, how do you guys think about the secondary market? Like, do you see that the primary or the secondary is larger on the platform? So it's about 50-50 right now. And I think there's a huge opportunity with the secondary market. It like, I think it opens up flexibility in pricing, right? You don't, it's not this like one-time shot, all right? You get one chance to monetize this piece of art

Starting point is 00:16:43 and it's going to go out and live its life, you know? So the fact that you can have recurring revenue there is completely game-changing. The first artist who sold a piece of art on SuperRare sold four pieces for $175 at the time. The first time it was resold, one of those pieces sold for $1,000. So he made the exact same amount

Starting point is 00:17:03 in the secondary market as he did the primary market on the first sale then it resold for ten thousand dollars and so he again you know kind of like 10x his return from making the original piece of art and then it later sold a year later for a hundred thousand dollars right this is and this is something artists have been dealing with for decades right they've actually tried to legislate this uh in many different jurisdictions uh it hasn't really ever worked and you know originally like i mentioned like when we started we were like hey this is an experiment like what if we just tried this we have all the tools available to make this work you know it's like a couple lines of code that says hey send you know send this money back to the creator and i think

Starting point is 00:17:45 it's really changing the game for how people think about creating their art yeah and paul when you start to think about the art that you're going to create here do you think that the same people will collect the art will it be the legacy kind of art creators or do you think that it'll actually be kind of a whole new base that you can tap into i think it's both i think it's a perfect combination of this entire um nft space it's really incredible it really opens up a whole new world for artists that you know i also found even in the physical gallery world often galleries would take my pieces sell them for a certain price and then tell you they sold it for something less and give you half and you really had no way of knowing i think the transparency of it too

Starting point is 00:18:21 gives it a whole nother level of honesty, which is really great. Yeah, absolutely. And then, John, when you see kind of the folks that are collecting here, how long are they holding for? Like, what's the behavior in terms of are people buying this art just to hold on to it? Or are they actually trying to flip it? And they're thinking of more as like an investment? Like, what's some of the stuff you're seeing there? Yeah, it's definitely both. I think if you look at the average, like hold time in the secondary market it's about a year and a half uh granted you know we're going off four years of data so i'm sure that's going to change as things mature um i think what's really interesting too is like

Starting point is 00:18:56 people are often buying for passion so it's like hey worst case scenario i have an amazing piece of art best case scenario you know at some point in the future i can sell this piece of art and reward the artist i think that's something that's really interesting like it's the secondary market is very much frowned upon in contemporary art. There's collectors who are like known flippers. You don't really want to sell to them. And part of the idea was like, what if we can make that a feature?

Starting point is 00:19:23 And so I think, you know, if you make it more mutual, you know, the whole market is better for it. But yeah, I'd say average hold time is about a year and a half. You definitely see some kind of like speculators and flippers, but mostly I think it's people who are new to collecting art, but excited to have the chance to do so.

Starting point is 00:19:41 Yeah, it's pretty cool. when both of you think about this um when you do a drop are there like best practices right that uh either super rare you you all are telling kind of artists that like hey look these are some of those best practices or paul maybe you know from like other art that you've sold as you go into this that you guys are thinking about and in terms of your collaboration here that uh likely increases the probability that uh one the people who want the art can actually get it and then two paul you uh get compensated for the time effort energy and creativity you've put into some of the pieces? I can jump in and take just some of the best practices we've seen. I

Starting point is 00:20:14 think one of the best parts of, or, you know, one of the most fun parts of this new market is the fact that it's happening in real time. So the ability to connect with artists in new ways is super exciting. So it's like, you know, have, you know, clubhouse is very cool six months ago. Now it's kind of Twitter spaces, but like whatever channel you're using, you know, talking about what's the motivation behind the art, like, you know, talking with the artists, that's one of the things that's most rewarding for collectors is, you know, learning about this human who created this, you know, piece of inspiration, right? Like I think a lot of the collectors love the fact that this is happening in real time and you get to actually interact and, you know, you're not just

Starting point is 00:20:52 buying a thing that you're going to like put in your closet. You know, this is something that someone put their, their heart and soul into, right? You're like creating this one-to-one connection with them when you become a collector. And so they really want to see like, who is this person? What's the motivation? You know, like what kind of energy am I bringing into my life? You know, if I buy this piece of art. Yeah. It's absolutely incredible to, uh, to kind of think about how, uh, much people have learned right in terms of how to do this. So Paul, maybe you can explain to us kind of how you think about the art itself, the meaning behind it. Right. And also the visualizations where the intersection is between, uh, the art you're creating, what it means,

Starting point is 00:21:29 and then ultimately what people will be buying when they go to this drop. Well, this drop is I put the most heart and soul into these three specific pieces. One is of my Circle of Love series, which I've been doing for a couple of years, which is my most popular collectible physical art. You can see one behind me. It says love in a circle, obviously Circle of Love, kind of a take on a modern version of what Robert Indiana did in the 70s. um i noticed that i always like love is obviously the most powerful word word in the world and uh no one's done anything interesting with it sculpturally um since robert indiana which he did in the 60s um and they're all around the world so i wanted to at least leave some kind of positive mark uh sculpturally and now with nfts i'm able to animate it into things um on

Starting point is 00:22:15 multiple larger scales like i told you about the building but um so i wanted each of these words to have significant meaning you know i'm all about love and friendships and for me in life that's more important than materialism or money um the other ones imagine and it's it's uh inspired by john lennon's imagine song i'm a big beatles fan um i threw little um i threw little words into the sculpture of titles of some of the songs like come together and hey jude and help and um you know and tried to make it them all consistently beautiful in copper and black um and i also wanted to add incredible music incredible animation and um just trying to do the best work i've ever done in my life um because the one thing about the blockchain and nft art versus my website for

Starting point is 00:23:03 example i can always go and update my website if i'm not happy with older work and i want to update it to current work what i realized in the blockchain is anything i put out is going to basically live forever in this space. So I obviously wanted my three best pieces to be on super rare for my first public drop like this, um, all one of ones. Um, and the third one is give, which again is, um, a lot of it comes from people that inspire me that give back, like, uh, I'm going to be doing a bunch of collaborations this year, one with Steve Wozniak. He's a very charitable guy. I'm doing a Bobby or drop, but I'm doing one with Jason Flom, who has a podcast called wrongful conviction um he's kind of one of my biggest inspirations actually and he's a friend

Starting point is 00:23:44 but he does such incredible work that people don't know you know he's he has this uh podcast where he interviews people that were wrongly convicted in jail for 20 30 years and then when they get out of jail he actually hands on the ground does stuff for these guys like buys him a car helps him get an apartment and he sends him around to friends you know even friends like me and i'll do their resume or photograph their headshot or kind of do whatever i can to to help them in a smaller way, you know, get back into society, get back on their feet. And we're going to do a wrongful conviction NFT series too, where we're going to take a portion of that money and give it to the people right when they get out of jail, because even though they might get big

Starting point is 00:24:21 lost settlement two, three, five years later from being wrongly convicted, as soon as they get out, often they don't have a dollar to their name. So we wanted to do something really cool like that as well. And I think that's just a big part of giving. And like I said, helping people that are struggling. I struggled my whole life financially. I've been doing well the last five, six years, but I really can relate to that. And I think, um, uh, that's the best gift I've ever gotten is, is the ability to understand struggle and how to give and how to give love and not, you know, not be some, not be materialistic at all and not have, uh, selfish needs so much all the time. I love it, man. You, you, uh, you got a special mind and the art you

Starting point is 00:25:01 create is absolutely incredible. I, uh, as I mentioned earlier, I've been to the studio and those who are listening to this may not know, but you have two separate parts to the studio that you have. And when you walk around, there's like every single piece. I was just like, oh, damn, I got to take a picture of that. Oh, damn, I got to take a picture of that. So it is it's pretty incredible work that you've got going on there. John, I'm going to leave it with you for the last word here. Tell us kind of how these drops work. If somebody is interested in going and checking out Paul's work, where should they go and and kind of how can they participate when the drop actually happens. Yeah, absolutely. So, um, when this drops, definitely head over to super rare.com.

Starting point is 00:25:38 Uh, we'll have a featured section on the website where you can kind of like see the auctions taking place. Um, you know, they're happening in real time. You, uh, you need some Ethereum in your wallet to, uh, to participate in the auction. Uh, so if you don't have any yet, definitely go get some and, um, yeah, just sign up for an account on super rare and, you know, you'll see if you're lucky enough to become a collector of Paul's. Awesome. Listen, both of you, I really appreciate you guys taking the time to do this. Uh, Paul, where can we send people to find you on the internet? Um, I mean, I have very few pieces I posted up. I, you know, I just did my, my one first drop that I had, uh, sold to the CEO of pastel. It was, was a company that I used to help

Starting point is 00:26:20 me onboard my first piece. And the guy wound up liking it so much. He actually bought it with a painting um but i really haven't put much out um what about social media my instagram uh paul gerben and my twitter is gerben fine art um which i just started getting into twitter now i never really thought i was someone who had much to say but now i realize how important twitter is in the universe of uh crypto um so i'm engaging and getting more engaged and uh i'm just really excited and grateful to you for the podcast and for everyone it's super rare and john and um i'm just super excited to work with everybody that i'm involved with it's just very exciting times awesome and john where can we send people to find you on the internet and also super rare

Starting point is 00:27:01 uh yeah so i'm super john on twitter super john on instagram and i also follow the main super twitter account uh so you can uh you know stay in touch with all the cool spaces and drops that we're doing so um follow those awesome john paul you both are legends i'm super excited about this drop who knows maybe i'll show up and do a little bidding myself but uh all right all right we'll definitely do this again in the future as you guys keep making progress all right thanks again yeah thanks for having me on it's a pleasure yeah great great podcast guys

The Pomp Podcast - #788 World Class Artist Joins the NFT Space w/ Paul Gerben

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