How Japanese graffiti Is sneaking onto the blockchain

Graffiti is impermanent.

Normally, thats a good thing, but as the global art world has begun to recognize graffiti and street art as a legitimate art form, the short-term and public nature of street art has presented challenges around sales and ownership.

The team at Totomo has found a solution. They have been working with street artists around the world and galleries across Tokyo to create a platform to prove digital ownership of street art.

We talk about the challenges of bringing digital tools and provenance into the spray-can world of street art, why this international team decided to launch in Japan first, and how to take advantage of the new startup support programs offered by the Shibuya government.

It's a great conversation, and I think you'll enjoy it.

Show Notes

The challenges involved in monetizing street art Is street art "legitimate", and how world opinion is changing Why Japan views street art differently Why Totomo is not using the standard NFT marketing strategy The importance of real-world gallery events Why most Totomo NFTs are not bought using crypto Do NFTs really pay artists on resale? Bailing an artist out of jail How attitudes to street art are changing in Japan The real reason Totomo launched in Japan first How a foreign-run startups can raise money from the Japanese government

Links from the Founders

Totemo Street Art NFT Gallery Street Art Collector podcast Follow Totemo on Twitter @totemoart See some great street art

Check it out on Instagram Street art on YouTube

Transcript Welcome to Disrupting Japan. Straight Talk from Japan's most successful entrepreneurs. I'm Tim Romero and thanks for joining me. Today we're going to talk about NFTs and no, no, it's not what you think. Regular listeners know that I'm an NFT skeptic, but being an honest skeptic means keeping an open mind. And in that spirit, I'd like to introduce you to the team at Totemo because they're doing some genuinely interesting things with graffiti, street art and the block chain. They're helping artists get paid and as far as I'm concerned, that's always a worthy activity. So, today we sit down for a four-way conversation with the Totemo team of Marty Roberts, Elena Calderon Alvarez and Minami Kobayashi. We talk about why Totemo decided to target their business much more tightly on the art community than on the crypto community. and also why this international team who represents international artists, decided to launch their startup in Japan. We talk about how graffiti and street art are becoming accepted as mainstream art around the world and the amazing level of support that the Shibuya government is providing startups these days and whether bailing your clients out of jail is a good use of investor capital. But you know, the Totemo team tells that story much better than I can. So, let's get right to the interview.

Interview Tim: So, I'm sitting here with the founders of Totemo. Marty, thanks for joining us. Marty: Thanks so much Tim for having us. Tim: It’s good to have you back. And Elena. Elena: Hi. Thank you for having us. Tim: It's good to have you on and Minami. Minami: Hi.. Thank you for having us. Tim: It's great to have you on. I don't usually have three people on the show, but making an exception this time because what you guys are doing is really interesting. You're bringing street art and graffiti art to the blockchain, but I think you can probably explain it a little better than I just did. So, what exactly does Totemo do? Marty: Yeah, yeah, I think you summed it up quite well already, but the point that we're trying to work on is that right now graffiti and street art, while it's loved by many around the world, it's impermanent and eventually it will be destroyed by the elements, by the government, by other graffiti writers. So, if there was a way to make this permanent and also collectable and tradable, that would be fantastic because then the artwork will exist forever and will have owners and be traded. And that will allow these street artists to be able to monetize their work in a new way. Tim: And so you've created basically an NFT auction house that that's dedicated to this street art and graffiti art. Marty: Exactly. Tim: So, you're doing things quite a bit differently than most NFT marketplaces and I mean that as a compliment. Marty: Thank you. Tim: So, the NFTs you're creating, they're not simple photographs of the artwork, there's additional work that goes into them, there's motion involved. Can you talk a little bit about the art itself? Minami: Basically we use pictures from real artworks that the already as same murals and we have like animation team that they help us to animate these pictures and to break them a bit of life. Tim: So Elena, you actually studied curation in Athens, right? And you've had a long interest in graffiti art and street art. And is this considered, for lack of a better word, legitimate art in the art world? Or is it something that's not quite accepted yet? Elena: Well, in Japan it's not really accepted yet. And that's why I moved here to Japan with the idea of doing like research about graffiti. My goal was like do PhD in graffiti and street art. That's why I choose this country because it's like totally different from any art scene or graffiti scene in the world. And in Europe they're like starting to do like museums focusing only in street art. Like in Berlin for example, they have a huge museum only focused on it. But in Japan it's not considered still any kind of art. So, that's why I wanted to take it a bit more in a like academic way, like studied in university. Tim: Yeah, I think that to a large extent it's still considered more of a nuisance than an art in Japan. So, is your go-to market, your marketing strategy, it's quite a bit different from the standard NFT marketplace and it seems like you've actually been working to engage the art community and the gallery community here in Tokyo. Marty: Yeah, absolutely. We're really working in strong partnership, not just with the artists but with the entire art community. Now of course we also work a lot within interconnections with the NFT community, which Minami can speak more about. But we found it's been really important to actually form live events at different galleries. We've been doing live events where the artists themselves perform some live painting so that people can see what goes into creating this art. Tim: So, I've noticed you have been doing the live events. You had one in October, another November. Is what you're doing closer to an art gallery style event or more of an NFT promotional event? Can you explain like how it leans one way or the other? Marty: I think it's more of a community building exercise. It's a little bit educational and focused because we want the people to meet the artists, hear the story. Why does that artist create this specific style of art? What is it that the artist is trying to say through their art? It's really interesting for the attendees to have a chance to speak with the artist, to hear from the artist. Sometimes the artist speaks a little bit then watching the artist perform live art is very, very fun. And then of course we do want to promote the NFTs, so we tend to perform an auction at the end. And also anyone who attends our event, we allow them into our NFT gallery because you're right, it's very different than other projects. We're not making 2000 copies of an NFT and just trying to make a quick buck on a drop. Tim: Right. Minor variations of… Marty: Right, right. We're taking, sometimes they're one of one NFTs. Sometimes they might be an addition of 50, just like a normal print art business might have. So, I'd say much more focused like the traditional gallery method rather than this NFT spammy approach that we've seen over the last several years. Tim: And so you mentioned the auctions. Is this a traditional offline auction or is it an online marketplace or is it kind of a hybrid auction? How are you selling these NFTs? Elena: So, far we are selling the art pieces on marketplace, but normally we do set price non auction, but still we have the auction to do the auction. But so far we did a live auction in real life. Tim: Yeah, like the physical space? Elena: Yeah, physical space. Tim: And so like the flyers and the promotional stuff, you mentioned that you could pay in crypto or cash or credit card. So, obviously trying to be very friendly to the non-crypto art community. What's the breakdown? Are most of the people coming from more of a traditional background and paying in cash and credit or most of the customers who are engaging with this coming from the crypto community and paying in ETH? Marty: We've had both. But at our live events, I mean in real life live events that we've hosted, most people I'm seeing are just really using credit cards, that's easier for them. And then in our online marketplace that's still, which is kind of in a closed beta right now, it only accepts ETH but we do plan to be adding a credit card option. Tim: No, I mean I think that's really interesting in that it is using the blockchain technology in the art domain rather than, for lack of a better term, kind of pulling the art into the blockchain. So, how does this focus on the art galleries, on the artist community, how does that factor into your long-term plans? Is that where you want to continue to focus or do you think that eventually or sooner than eventually perhaps you'd want to address the much bigger speculative financial crypto markets as the bigger market? Or do you just want to stay focused on the art community? Marty: Well, we really feel that our collectors that we're targeting are more people who are actual art collector.