Hacker News Reader

Comment by pjc50 | Hacker News Reader

"We didn't need a preview": the content of the art isn't important. Like most NFTs, it's just a url that you can sign a hash of for dollars.

What's more interesting is the allegation that this is "tape painting": sold to an accomplice for the purpose of promoting the NFT "art" market.

View on HN

In the art world it's a pretty straightforward formula: -Buy out the estate of a 3rd tier artist who once drank a beer with a famous artist -Created slick marketing materials written by an art critic who was paid a lot of money to hold their nose -Place several key pieces up for auction and an accomplice buys them at inflated prices -Market is cornered, established prices are high, nothing left to do but sell to buyers who are too lazy to form a critical opinion and who instead rely on the manufactured signals from steps 1, 2 and 3. -Once all the best pieces are picked through you still have a bunch of inflated junk that you can use as collateral for other nefarious schemes. Source: worked in a gallery for many years.

This reads so spot on. Can you give some examples of recent artists who have had hype Manufactured for them in this manner?

And, for the 'art investor', as long as other collectors don't sell for a lower price, it doesn't even matter. Many galleries will blacklist collectors who sell for lower prices. As long as there's someone to buy, you're fine.

Is it legal to exclude someone from a public auction?

And couldn't the person just hire someone to buy for them?

Most art sales don't happen through public auction. If you want to invest in more art, you'll have to go through galleries, which may choose whether or not to sell to you. And word does get around about who is bringing down the price of an artist.

The famous "bigger idiot" theory, so much in the economy depends on it, apparently.

> What's more interesting is the allegation that this is "tape painting": sold to an accomplice for the purpose of promoting the NFT "art" market.

That's literally how the non-digital art market works, as well.

Art is the prototypical intersubjective meme, isn't it? You know something is art iff you know there's plenty of other people who also believe it's art.

The quality of being art has some positive correlation with being aesthetically pleasing, and has some negative correlation with being useful for practical purposes, but the determining factor is whether you can reasonably expect other people to consider it art too.

Intersubjective memes have a bootstrap problem (the concept is a supertype of "network effects"). To make something art, you have to make people believe other people believe its art. A way to brute-force this is to get someone to visibly spend large amount of money (or other resources) on it, and proclaim their belief in the value of the thing.

So it's not just the NFT "art" market that's being promoted here; the work itself is being turned into art, and the author into artist.

One datapoint in your favor is that the price was, specifically, 69 million. The purchase is an act akin to the art itself - puerile content at impressive scale.

> That's literally how the non-digital art market works, as well.

Though there's a fraction of the non-digital art market that doesn't work like that. For NFTs, I wouldn't be surprised if "painting the tape" was pretty much the whole thing.

> What's more interesting is the allegation that this is "tape painting": sold to an accomplice for the purpose of promoting the NFT "art" market.

It seems like the more conventional term is "painting the tape." Googling for "tape painting" pretty much only gives results about painting with masking tape.

Painting the tape tends to relate to market trading activity, but the underlying ethos is the same in both markets. Make a public statement about price so oth

>the content of the art isn't important

But art critics have started to analyze it, so who knows.

Even if it’s painting the tape it’s an expensive proposition at close to $10 million in Christie’s fees.

10 million in ETH. How easy is it to exchange large sums like that? (Genuine question, I have no idea)

Sounds like a tiny portion of ETH's daily volume ($23B). I'm not sure if it would even noticeably move the price.

If it's going to another Eth address then it's as simple as sending a transaction. Fees are a problem these days but they could've sent it for as little as 1-2usd to as high as 30-100usd. Higher fees mean faster processing.

Christie's terms specified the fee was not payable in ETH, only in government currency.

Where did you hear about this allegation and is it credible

I think most of the news articles are based on this original reporting:

https://amycastor.com/2021/03/14/metakovan-the-mystery-beepl...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com