Beeple Mania
esquire.com
esquire.com
Right now it's owned/stored by the artist and someone buying the piece from me would be able to get it delivered directly from Beeple. That's a new level of unboxed where the piece of art is basically unseen at this point in time and can easily be guaranteed original.
[1] https://niftygateway.com/itemdetail/primary/0xd92e44ac213b9e...
But doesn't this defeat the goal of NFT? If you are the owner, then if it's stored by the creator or not it's irrelevant, right?
It's just like buying anything from an artist, save the receipt and ask him to store it from you, the difference is that storage of a, let's say painting, requires more space and controlled humidity/temp.
Assuming the creator is trustworthy, then I don't think so. Isn't this common in the art world? I thought lots of expensive art is stored in expensive secured vaults. Or maybe I'm thinking of the film Tenet (I don't actually know anything about the art world).
in tariff/tax free zones between jurisdictions, in a kind of customs limbo - exported from one jurisdiction, yet not imported into another (and thus no need to pay taxes/tariffs). The bill of sale is basically your NFT.
... yet apparently there are "Black Lotuses" everywhere, because people are making them left and right (not literal black lotus ofc).
And we left it here:
- are people mistaking something "unique" with something that's "rare"?
- is money really that much inflated?
- is crypto that much inflated?
- are these transactions being done among the same "kind of people", and it will reach a cap eventually with no one to dump these NFTs to?
It's like people want collectibles but seem to have decided to cut off a big part of what makes a collectible valuable. Everyone want's to get rich with the next big rare item, without having to go through years of cultural shifts.
For example, some MTG cards/sets represent a time and a place for many people, they were part of a culture. The rareness comes from the fact that a lot of these items had limited (some were literally alpha and beta versions of the game), and few endured the weight of time and life.
It's not because they have a unique id.
Cryptopunks represent the early move of the NFT... but is that such a noteworthy valuable thing? Maybe it is.
I'm not saying that Beeple isn't a good digital artist, he is. Neither I'm saying his art isn't worth what people paid for, probably it's worth it.
Yet, some how, can't help but feeling that something is off. Or it's just me that I'm just not getting "the thing"?
Consider the case that this truly is here to stay. Kind of cool to be able to flair one of the first really pricey NFTs, which also happens to be an art piece you think is kind of rad.
>Kind of cool to be able to flair one of the first really pricey NFTs, which also happens to be an art piece you think is kind of rad.
Which you nailed here, it's like they are pricey for the sake of being pricey. Or they're unique for the sake of being unique, not being unique because there were restrains that make it rare.
If some of these pieces are going to millions of USD, then we might be at a point where any Picasso painting reached the billion dollar mark, that circles back to one of my questions: is there so much money in circulation? Or this is just fake money being thrown around?
What makes a collectible valuable? I think it's just scarcity plus a group choice to value that scarcity.
I don't think this is new or unique to non-physical collectibles, other collectibles also follow a pattern of increased demand for scarcity.
Take baseball cards. We know that better players have more expensive cards, and the more scarce the card the higher the value, along with other characteristics of the card. Makes some intuitive sense.
But that's not enough for collectors who want some cards to have a very high value. So then there's this collective agreement that rookie cards are going to be worth a lot more, not just based on print run, but based on the ability of the whole group to point at it and say that's a thing we value.
Then we have condition of the card, mint or near mint or worn, those are all different values. Again it makes intuitive sense because it's based on quality in some way. But it's not enough, so ever more sophisticated grading mechanisms are invented, well beyond any actual value to someone observing the card. It's a difference the naked eye can't perceive, only experts with sophisticated tools. But once they inspect it and give their mark of approval, it's a new point of scarcity that everyone can value.
It's all just invented value for the sake of value, the main thing is that the group can collectively point at something scarce and call it valuable. Misprints are another example, where the value is obvious not coming from quality and only from scarcity.
People don't just value baseball cards because there's a designed scarcity for particular players and there's a consensus that a specific card is valuable.
You're missing the history of a game that took many years to establish themselves and grew a base of followers and fans over decades. It's a competitive game, with different leagues, with teams that have fans.
This is why the cards have value, and there's no consensual agreement that X and Y card is valuable, it's something so simple and intuitive that even children understand this. Even if it's just by the transactions in their playground among colleagues and friends (not because many people have some card, and everyone seems to want it, but because it's represents a popular player and it's a rare card - that's why they want it).
Then there's plenty of sub sections of this, like you said: misprints, particular years, etc.
But it all revolves around a cultural event.
What you're seeing with NFTs are assets created for the sake of being unique - it's not consequential of anything. It's designed to be that way.
It's like they turned the baseball card analogy upside down - they created NFTs for the sake of being NFTs, it's not serving any purpose and scarcity has no logic behind it. I think the closest analogy would be the Beanie Babies, that were trying to hack this mechanic with nothing else to support it no other then "they are scarce".
There's no emotional bond to it, it doesn't serve the purpose of a game (like balance wise), it's not even merchandising to promote something that's eventually going to become popular and that's popular to a specific niche.
You've got the blinds or the antes, and fundamentally, every pot is about fighting for that money. Without the ante, nobody should put any money into the pot.
But once you have a penny ante, the pot size can grow exponentially, and you can find yourself fighting over a many-thousand dollar pot, even if the truth is the fight started over a fight for a penny, and the game is about fighting for a penny every hand.
What I'm saying is, sure, with baseball cards the ante might be an emotional bond to the subject matter. But it quickly spirals and becomes about the collectible, primarily. I can go look at amazing pictures of famous baseball players I love all day, I don't need to own the cards.
I don't think NFTs are really skipping a step, Top Shots is selling you an MP4 of a basketball player you love sinking a shot. It's just the absurdity of it is more apparent when the ante is something you could press Ctrl+C/Ctrl+V to copy.
Something that was designed to be scarce, for the sake of being scarce. Serves no other goal: it's not a balancing mechanism to game (overpowered cards are rare), it's not promoting something that people love and want to be a part of (like baseball cards), hell it's not even a celebration of some success with the fans, nothing that holds people emotionally attached to any of it other then those that want to hope on something to resell later - this is completely the wrong motivation.
look at what happened to baseball sports cards in the late 90s and still continue today
holograms, refractors, patch cards, "printing plates" cards. these cards are "valuable" because of the perceived scarcity but the issue is trying to get one is completely random and based on luck whereas the original value of baseball cards was people didn't keep them in mint condition and kids put them on their bikes to make cool sounds.
same thing with comic books. the comic book makers produced the scarcity or collectible, and then produced too much of that scarcity and the whole comic book market imploded.
this guy's art is cool, and good for him for making tons of money off it. but it does feel like partly FOMO and also some people have too much money during the pandemic that they don't know where to park so they dump it into stuff like this.
i think the biggest issue with this stuff is it's already skyrocketed well outside the range of even relatively well off individuals. i certainly don't have the money to outbid someone who put in nearly $800K for basically a blockchain entry. like how are you going to get normal people to care about this other than, "it sold for a lot of money" which is basically the only reason this stuff got an article in esquire.
This is (or will be) one of "the next big things" in this century; I'm fairly confident about that. What's off is that it's very new and so people don't know how to talk about it yet.
Witness this article, which seems to deliberately confuse the predictable weirdness of the art style (it's not that weird... it's just neo-Dadaism for our times) with the unpredictable emergence of NFTs.
I think NFTs are yet another interesting (perhaps local) maxima of the search space, which is "ways to get back some of that old-fashioned tangible value from digital goods". Looked at this way, it's not really surprising that something like NFTs would become a thing.
What's silly (and cynical, in my opinion) is when tech writers bury the lede by associating the technology with the avant garde uses of it. This is similar to the bizarre obsession by many legacy mainstream car manufacturers for making their electric cars look like hippie pretentious toys. The tech is obviously useful. The fashion is the trojan horse for the tech. But it gets old when people realize the almost banal usefulness of the tech itself. Then you don't need the silly-looking horse anymore.
But it does make sense, in a way, to explore the complete opposite of the (almost) perfect fungibility of normal cryptocurrency, even if only in a "what if we flip one of our basic assumptions on its head" kind of way.
We held a Digital Art Conference down here in Brazil and we brought Beeple in for a keynote, and it was an amazing experience, he's super bright.
But yeah the guy is always dressed to kill, impeccably, almost too serious -- so it's quite contrasting when you see the real artist and his likeness compared to how wild his art is.
He also was quite curious about Renoise (a tracker software I was using to play live music at one point), and asked "What software is that?!". That was a fun moment.
Honestly I can’t do anything but shake my head in disapproval about crypto-art (and crypto currency in general) when it involves wasting so much energy.
otherwise yes, energy usage will be dropping massively on most networks with pos upgrades.
As long as there's no actual widespread fully working currency using only PoS, it's a bit like justifying the emissions from flying by pointing to experimental solar powered aircraft, and saying all flights will be solar powered any day now.
Cardano already uses PoS
This is literally the worst argument against crypto.
That's the $64k question. Who, exactly, is buying rare digital art? It doesn't seem to be traditional collectors, dealers or major institutions. But the same contingent of crypto "whales" speculating in alt-coin assets. A simple bot could even be employed to track auction prices and automate trades. In a sense its not dissimilar to inter-market dealing among art galleries. Without the actual physical objects.
Beeple's Opus
https://www.christies.com/features/Monumental-collage-by-Bee...
Mark Cuban was talking about this yesterday on bankless podcast, how an NFT can contain all the royalty payments for e.g. a film or tv show, director/producer/actors/editors, and when someone wants to show it they rent it for a period of time (or buy it to rent to others), their rent payment instantly divided across everyone involved. That utility saves a lot of time and money. His comparison is to how he still receives physical checks for $1 from some episode of a tv show he did that are barely worth cashing, saving time/money in that process is potentially big business.
I've seen people minting tweets as NFTs - again, how does the copyright work here.
Genuine question - seen NFTs come up a lot over the last fortnight - don't really understand it at all (which makes me feel old!).
Or rather, as far as I can tell the default off-chain answers apply in the absence of explicit directions otherwise.
Physical fine art has come up with answers (you don't get the copyright just because you bought the original), though, and I'm sure NFTs will eventually.
There's also the possibility of putting code into the smart contracts to explicitly give you the royalties earned on-chain. Not really a thing yet, but it's obviously possible to do.
So assuming this followed the physical art model, and in the absence of any kind of 'on chain' royalties, you're literally just buying to say "I own this"? Except you don't own the copyright, and, being a digital file, thousands of other people could have an identical copy?
Am I correct in thinking this is kind of 'digital bragging rights'? Like - without a physical copy, short of us all living in a 'Ready Player One' style virtual world that someone made it explicit that "XYZ owns this art by ABC" - there's not actually much you can do other than own it (and maybe sell it later)?
If a piece takes off in popularity, I can imagine that there is also extra status to being the first to own that particular piece, which will forever be visible on the blockchain. [Edit - it does seem kind of strange to be the second or later owner though, I wonder if that could actually hurt resale value.]
Very curious to see how this develops. If it opens up new possibilities for artists to get their work funded and it can lead to a flourishing of the arts I'm all for it.
To me it may devalue art, seeing how I feel it's the NFT and not the art that people value.
Yes I guess it can apply to other things as well. I would indeed expect books and movies to possibly fit the same pattern. And I guess you could set up a public sexual partners log as well where both participants can use their private key to sign a statement that they did indeed engage in intercourse but I'm not sure that that would take off :)
I think the point is still being discovered and it also seems totally possible that this is just a fad. It's the first practical application of cryptocurrency that I can somehow see making sense (if I squint).
For me, that doesn't carry a lot of value, but, then again, aside from things like margin notes and what not, a paper manuscript that was merely a handwritten copy of what later became a published book wouldn't carry a lot of value either. Yet, if I owned it, there may be people who would want to look at it out of curiosity, or who wanted to know the story of how I came by it, etc.
Are NFT's effectively cryptocurrency mixers? If I've got $100k in bitcoin it doesn't matter where I move it from an audit perspective because it's going to be on the blockchain, whereas if I buy an NFT, I have an asset of that notional value assigned to an arbitrary anonymous wallet of my choice after paying the art owner.
I don't know that the 5 figure prices will last forever, but the market probably will.
Cryptopunks is the only "native" NFT I feel will likely keep a market. Again, maybe not at present levels, but it's got enough of a cool factor to last.
And Beeple as the artist with the brightest future, obviously.
It's also interesting that these nfts are rarely presented as solutions to prove the ownership of non-digital art. There are millions of people who own (very convincing) prints of Mondrians, and yet when we enter the home of someone rich enough to buy an actual Mondrian we usually just assume all the art hanging on their walls are originals.
That's what seems counterintuitive about all this: In a sense this is the most successfull instance of NFTs being used to sell digital art yet, but also the most unnecessary. If you are a crypto millionaire from Singapore you don't need NFTs to convince anyone you actually own the Beeple piece you say you own.
(Although an obvious use of all this is that it turns digital art into a store of value that buyers can potentially sell at a higher price.)
So if you imagine a FAANG salary as being just slightly above minimum wage in this alternate universe you can derive all the consequences of what happens in crypto markets from there, including the new top 5% who can casually pay these sums for art.
Well okay, fuck it, I got rent to pay and I got a bunch of art lying around that's had a lot more love put into it than what I'm seeing on the front page of Nifty. I'm hitting that signup button despite my general misgivings about the huge energy cost of crypto.
Are you really concerned about people utilizing electricity, or are you actually concerned about carbon footprint? If the carbon thing, look where crypto-mining happens. It's almost exclusively with overflow power from areas that get their energy from hydro, wind, geothermal etc, so the additional carbon produced by mining is negligible.
Second, Ethereum, on which all serious NFT activity is based, is midway through a transition from PoW to PoS (proof-of-work to proof-of-stake) where people demonstrate their commitment to validating transactions by locking up their funds rather than burning electricity. There are over 3 million ETH locked, which is over 6 billion dollars at the moment, and growing, all to validate transactions on this new PoS network.
I feel like this is a classic case of "tree falls in a forest, does anyone hear it?" where the confusion relies on the word "hear" being used in two ways (objective sound waves travelling through air, vs subjective perception). Is the word "own" being used in two ways here?
It's like, imagine if you bought an original Picasso, but a device existed where someone walking past your house could magic a copy of your painting right into their hands, down to the molecule. Sure, you'd still have the original, but the only way to prove it is by referencing the paper trail from the auction house that you're the last person who purchased it through "official" channels. Same for these NFTs - the blockchain is the irrefutable source of who "officially" owns the art.
Personally, I think this is only a thing because people generally want to show off the fact that they "own" something rather than "just" having it in their house. Like, why bother spending $XX millions on an original painting when you could just pay a talented artist to copy it for you with real paints for a fraction of the cost? As long as you're not trying to pass it off as an original for sale, no one would care if you cloned a famous painting.
It's because being able to show off your name on the "who owns this" line is more important than the actual thing.
I think the folks in the crypto world are using it one way and you're introducing a second meaning. They just mean "own" in the legal-rights way. Like one might "own" a company if they buy all the stock, even if they've never seen it.
> Owning a public digital item doesn't seem to grant any kind of control.
Owning a digital item is basically just buying the copyright. It's not everything, but it's real.
Ownership is, in all cases, a limited right. You can imagine two identical cars parked on the street - you own the first, the second has been abandoned by its owner. It would be equally hard for someone to take either car. Ownership 'just' means you can request the help of civic society in retrieving it.
Non-fungible tokens look a lot like initial coin offerings 2.0. There are going to be a lot of sucker bets.
"If you've been in the game for half an hour and you don't know who the patsy is, you're the patsy."
I'm interested when the things you own in one place can be used in other places. Cryptoart has been at the spear tip for interoperability since every world wants to support artists in having a gallery on their platform.
Are there specialized frames that display these as digital works?
I could say "I have dibs on Lake Louise" and make a blockchain entry that echoes this claim via some token... and so what? That's supposed to be worth something?
I'm not grokking this. If anyone can explain how NFTs are a thing at all or worth anything? Heads up: if you use the word "fiat" I'll know you're a hustler.