This NFT is not "The Brooklyn Bridge", this NFT is "Remember when John Cleese sold the Brooklyn Bridge NFT". Do you think nobody wants the bragging rights of owning that? I certainly do, but not for $50k, which it already has.
It would be nice to believe that eventually we evolve beyond bragging about being an idiot.
> I certainly do
...
You don't buy a jpeg, you buy the unique item that John Cleese sold.
Same for movie props. You can buy a nice lightsaber below $200. The ones that were used in the movies... a bit more.
A NFT is not an item.
> Same for movie props. You can buy a nice lightsaber below $200. The ones that were used in the movies... a bit more.
Those are things. There is no correlation. NFT is selling you a pointer. It's a hash that on one software platform says "that thing over there". When Bob buys a NFT, he isn't buying a lightsaber that he can display, loan out, or hold . Bob is buying a number.
It would be more impressive if Jack can sell his first tweet, once on each major platform. Now they are somewhat fungible, non fungible titles. If one is worth more than the other, why?
I do agree that it's completely ridiculous, but I feel that way about the stock market.
Just, -poof-. Gone.
Ownership of that land was simply taken from them, and evenly divided amongst their tenants.
There's a very similar danger with i.e. property rights inside of videogames and stuff - until and unless there's case law about it, I can go into my buddy's proverbial minecraft server, wreck all of his (potentially months of) work, and there's really nothing he can do about it. I might lose a friend over it, but I won't lose a lawsuit.
The illustrative bit about the minecraft server is I'm at the mercy of "the community of people who agrees that thing has value", and in this case, it's one person.
Luxury and self-image and [silent] bragging rights were always part of the economy, now it just also includes lulz, which happen to be much more accessible to create :)
> The point is not to argue over what qualifies as “art.” It is simply that it is a mistake to assume that NFTs will fail in the art world.
https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2021-03-17/the-nf...
It's fresh, it's pushing boundaries, it's making people think and wonder, it's generating snark and discussion.
If readymades are art, if a blank canvas is art, then art is just a scam!
Not sure if it will stand the test of time though (I mean technically in terms of the artifacts persisting, and conceptually, aka whether it will still be interesting in 10 years or seen as a fad).
Survivorship bias. The successes are highly visible, and we never hear of the failures.
> If readymades are art, if a blank canvas is art, then art is just a scam!
Ceci n'est pas une pipe. All art is a kind of deception.
Not necessarily. Creators who toil in obscurity during life but receive posthumous recognition do happen.
Meanwhile, in craftsman's art fields (all of the many ingredients that go into filmmaking, videogames, etc), if you're merely competent at what you do, it's like being a programmer - you learn the skills, and you get a job doing it, and my goodness - it pays a salary. There's no lottery involved. If you're a good matte painter, concept artist, 3d modeller, et cetera, illustrator, figure artist, etc, etc - people gladly pay money for it.
--
Anecdotally, as someone in the games industry (and knowing some folks in film), the difference between these two fields (con art and skilled art) is pretty stark. Every person I've know who's tried to do con art has failed to make a career out of it, and every person who's gotten a degree-equivalent level of skill/effort into skilled art has earned a living doing it (in much the same way they would in programming).
Not for the folks I know. I know plenty of authors, painters, photographers, and ex-film-students who need day jobs. It's practically a trope. These are people with degrees in the subject who have already made professional money at it, but can't make enough steady money with it.
(guessing here) If you met these people on the job, you'd know a lot more gainfully employed folks simply by definition.
I don't think anyone's under the impression that people paying lots of money for extremely stupid things is a recent phenomenon. I deride those buying single-colour canvasses for 8 figure price tags just the same as I deride anyone buying into the litany of crypto pyramid schemes.
I get it that some people buy it as investments, hoping to find a sucker to sell it to at a higher price. But that just sounds like pump-and-dump to me. Or maybe it's rich people who have run out of fun things to do with their money.
Me, I'd rather do what Elon Musk does. I wanted to buy stock in SpaceX, but it is privately held, so I bought TSLA instead. Lucked out on that one.
People buy and collect all kinds of worthless tuff. I know several people that spent between $3k and $10k on Magic the Gathering cards. From a non-player's perspective it's ridiculous. The cards are worthless and you could just print out images of the cards on a printer or copy machine if all you cared about was playing the game itself.
And yet people do it.
Is a NFT really any different? Is it wrong for people to spend their money on whatever they want?
It’s digital baseball cards and pet rocks, “but crypto”.
I also remain convinced that NFTs are a fad in their current iteration. To use a rough analogy, NFTs are taking the record store into crypto when the future lies in building Spotify/Netflix in crypto.
Overcome a challenge that presses your personal limitations? Worthy of a brag: you took up the task, persevered, and conquered.
Open your wallet to purchase something? I just don’t see that there’s any legitimate boasting to be had there: any damn fool with the same money could do it. There is no challenge, there is no accomplishment, there is nothing to be proud of at all. It’s such empty bragging.
IMO people who brag about owning things have deep personal insecurities and would be better off putting the money spent towards therapy.
Bragging with an expensive Rolex is very different than bragging with the NFT of a terrible image of the Brooklyn Bridge by John Cleese who sold it as a joke.
The person who built the watch might have something to brag about.
The item isn’t the brag. The purchase is. People don’t buy Rolxes because because it doesn’t anything radically different than a $50 watch. They buy it because it tells people they have money. That’s what art is. That’s what NFT is.
Yeah, but who gives a shit whether it's centralized or not?
If some intrepid reporter figured out that NFT has a backdoor that means it is being controlled as a-- god forbid-- centralized service, what bad thing happens to the dipshit who paid a million dollars for Rick and Morty digital art?
A) The world biggest fan of Cubism and a lifelong fan of Picasso.
B) A person with a shitload of money, that has nowhere else to put the money than in some famous artwork.
Chances are most will expire worthless, but a select few may be early works from people who go down in history.
You certainly seem to be right, but where's the authority for that observation coming from? Or what would the actual Brooklyn Bridge look like as an NFT?