John Cleese has an NFT bridge to sell you for $69.3M | Hacker News Reader

John Cleese has an NFT bridge to sell you for $69.3M

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55 pointsherodotus70 comments

Previously discussed:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26531162

Finally an NFT I can get behind.

I still cannot fathom why people think buying a certificate of authenticity authenticated by nobody, whose supply can be arbitrarily increased by the seller at any time, is an interesting exercise.

All you get is a certificate of authenticity for a URL lol. Nice.

The best answer is that NFTs are worth as much as stupid rich people with too much money value them. The same is true of all art.

I’ve thought about this a lot, both about NFTs and the modern art market, and that is the best explanation. It’s just stupid rich people and their stupid status signaling games.

Wise rich people don’t really do the worthless art thing, except maybe as an investment to diversify with.

> a certificate of authenticity authenticated by nobody

What do you mean? It's authenticated by the artist saying it's theirs

Anyone can make an NFT of anything, and people have tried to sell NFTs of famous works they definitely didn't create themselves.

People have tried to make forgeries of artwork they definitely didn't create themselves; go see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F_for_Fake.

The fact that some people are minting fakes and selling them on open bazaars like OpenSea [0] is completely irrelevant to the fact that NFTs can easily prove provenance. For example, if you buy a CryptoPunk, anyone with serious interest can trivially prove the provenance of what they are buying given the original contract is well known.

Most artwork of value is being minted through well known platforms with identifiable contracts (like ArtBlocks or SuperRare), or via other identifiable means.

In 50 years, if an artwork is still highly valued, Christie's or Sotheby's will be able to prove an artwork is an original much more easily if it's an NFT than they can today.

[0] Although OpenSea dose try to police its platform and remove fakes.

Do you think this is any different than real art?

I'm not sure how to respond to this. Yes? Like, trivially yes. When you buy a piece of traditional art you get a physical piece of art.

Likewise artists having been selling digital art for ages too either in the form of prints or high res files.

NFTs don't achieve anything as far as I can tell, they're effectively a receipt with extra steps. And when the thing you're buying is publically available to everyone else anyway, what use is a receipt?

"I still cannot fathom why people think buying a certificate of authenticity authenticated by nobody, whose supply can be arbitrarily increased by the seller at any time, is an interesting exercise."

This is what I was responding to. Here is a photograph by Andy Warhol for $95,000:

https://www.artsy.net/artwork/andy-warhol-marisa-berenson-an...

The website states that:

Signature: Stamped by artist's estate, Stamped on the verso by the Estate of the Artist and The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts. Foundation … Certificate of authenticity: Included

What is to prevent the artist (other than the fact this one is dead) from "arbitrarily increasing" supply, other than the fact that he has committed not to?

Let's compare this with a unique audiovisual NFT: http://deafbeef.com

Here, you have a work limited to 128 pieces, which the artist has committed to cap the series at. The work can be authenticated as an original based on the blockchain, and the NFT proves the provenance.

The crowd here may intuitively dislike NFTs, but it's arguments are trivially applicable to may other kinds of traditional art.

> The crowd here may intuitively dislike NFTs, but it's arguments are trivially applicable to may other kinds of traditional art.

Your example isn't the same thing - you're buying the photograph and the certificate of authenticity. An authentic photograph. With NFTs, you're only buying the certificate of authenticity. Literally nothing else. I don't believe there's anywhere on earth a certificate of authenticity in isolation is worth more than the paper its printed on.

Nobody's paying anything for a certificate of authenticity that says the Mona Lisa was painted by Leonardo da Vinci - alongside a museum map with a big red circle around where you can find it - when the art itself remains firmly in the Louvre.

The NFT doesn't prove provenance of the art, only of itself. It has no connection to the art other than the connection you ascribe to it. Remember, blockchains only meaningfully encapsulate concepts wholly represented on the blockchain. Art is not such a concept. NFTs are. But they're not connected to the art in any way.

And what if the media is stored on chain as part of the NFT? How is that different than buying a photo?

Barrier to entry for duplication, honestly. Anyone can copy-paste a JPEG. Duplicating a Da Vinci requires time, money and skill.

Further, digital art is reproducible at 100% fidelity, whereas any duplicates of physical art will be distinctive not just in their provenance but also in their physical characteristics.

I guess my question to you is: how is this any different than a watermarked JPEG signed with a PGP key?

IIRC the vast majority of these art buyers don't put their art on display anywhere, even in their own residences; the artwork ends up hidden away in private collections to preserve it for resale (or to enhance the owner's reputation).

The actual, physical piece of artwork is almost entirely redundant already; the NFT business just makes it more obvious.

They still have legal rights over something (whether tangible or intangible). NFTs don't actually confer any rights to anything by default, only ownership of the NFT itself. To have any actual rights recognised by law, you'd need some kind of physical legal contract conferring those rights on the owner of the NFT, in which case you may as well just have the contract and no NFT...

I don't know what you mean by "physical legal contract", but yes, you need a license of some sort. That can be embedded on the Blockchain though, e.g. see:

https://feralfile.com/docs/artist-collector-rights

The NFT allows the art to have proven provenance, scarcity, transferability, composibility with DeFi projects (e.g. it can be fractionalized, insured, borrowed against, staked, etc., all on-chain). If you don't see value in that, I don't think you're looking very deeply at it.

The legal right is not a chain concept and requires the cooperation and enforcement of your local government, and is something anyone can do at any time. And does implicitly and explicitly when they create art. But we're not talking about art when we talk about NFTs, we're talking about certificates of authenticity of art issued by whoever which have no real-world connection.

The provable scarcity is funny, each is unique so each one has a scarcity of 1, but the concept it represents can just be duplicated at will by the issuer or literally anyone else. Say you bought the beeple. Beeple didn't give up the right to sell the exact same thing to someone else, and remains perpetually able to debase your investment at their sole discretion. The scarcity argument holds zero water when compared to for instance Bitcoin, which has a hard-coded quantity. Not that, you know, exchanges can't oversell coins if they wanted to, so long as there's no systemic bank run.

Scarcity notwithstanding, the idea that you can fractionalize, insure and borrow against NFTs in an automated, trustless and decentralized way is pretty weak - to put it mildly. Since each token is unique, there's no consistent bid-ask for you to determine its worth. It's a super duper low liquidity market, and its going to get lower liquidity on a per-NFT basis the more NFTs exist.

All you know is what the last person paid, whenever they paid for it - years ago even. Just because someone at peak mania bought a beeple or whatever for $69 million dollars today doesn't mean you can borrow $10 against it a few years from now. If they tried to resell that NFT today, I can't imagine they'd get more than a few thousand already haha.

That's exactly why art is used for money laundering.

That's exactly why NFTs are used for money laundering.

“ Say you bought the beeple. Beeple didn't give up the right to sell the exact same thing to someone else, and remains perpetually able to debase your investment at their sole discretion.”

I continue to be amazed you don’t see that this also applies to real art, especially now that many artists are using digital processes or photographic ones. The artist says a series will be limited — that’s all. That has weight in the real world and in NFTs because artists have reputations; in both instances, you are trusting them not to debase their work by printing more.

NFTs aren't art they're certificates of authenticity. The art can be infinitely duplicated with cmd-C cmd-V.

However, yes, this is a characteristic of prints. Which is why few insure them, nobody fractionalizes them, very few lend against them and certainly not in an automated no questions asked way. Because there's no way to ascertain their value. Which is also why they're used for money laundering.

Money laundering, except digital, isn't a great slogan.

Putting aside “real” art for a moment: for many mediums, I do. It’s the same difference that explains why an original acrylic painting costs a fortune while a print is $30 in the gift shop. In many mediums a digital copy cannot capture the texture, light effects, and other features originally intended by the artist. In these mediums I think only the originals can capture the human intentions of the artist themselves, and a great deal of value stems from the fact that you hold in your physical hands a piece of a person. Only the owner can see these things. This certainly does not apply to all artistic mediums, but it does seem to apply more to the art I see in the price ranges common to NFTs.

what about reproductions of sculptures, where the texture is perfectly reproduced?

I think authenticity has some value, but that value does not lie in the art itself.

Art is not the object, never has been, art is not the materials. Art is not a chord progression. A dictionary of all the words is not War and Peace. Art is not the raw data from a cmos sensor. NFTs are nothing like art.

There are many art forgers that have cranked out fakes that have fooled many art experts, i.e. they are truly indistinguishable. And yet, their value, once discovered to be a fake, is negligible next to the cost of the "original". So no, most of the value (at least to the market, maybe not you personally) is not in the technical quality, but in the provenance -- in that it's the "original".

That’s because they are forgeries, a good reproduction costs a lot of money, not as much as the original but it’s quite common to commission reproduction copies of famous paintings ones that will use period materials and techniques can cost a small fortune on their own.

This is also very common with statues that are even more expensive due to the materials and labor cost, a good copy of say David that isn’t a cast can cost high six figures easily.

...yes?

In fact I don't see anything that's the same as real art.

Real physical art is unique in the vast majority of cases and NFT's do literally nothing to authenticate a physical object anyways.

> Real physical art is unique in the vast majority of cases

Forgeries are a thing, thus "authentication"

> NFT's do literally nothing to authenticate a physical object anyways

What does? If I got some kind of physical object that came with a physical piece of paper that says "This is totally legit" how is that any different?

Forgeries have been a thing yes. And many were so good that they fooled (and continue to fool) some of the foremost experts on particular types of art/artists, for years and years. And then an advance in a technique may mean the forgery is unmasked many years later.

For a moment, let's leave aside digital art (NFT's have a role there). There is no way at all that an NFT can be reasonably "tethered" to a specific physical object in order to prove its authenticity. None as far as I understand it.

Therefore, what's to stop me from creating a forgery a decade later (say for some art that's disappeared into a private collection), and claiming that the NFT relates to that? How does the NFT prove anything at all other than at a point in time, the actual artist used a digital signature to sign a ... a what? How do you create a digital representation of a physical object that you can tie to a specific object? It's not the signing that does it. And if we knew the answer, we wouldn't need NFT's in the first place.

Let's say that the thing that the NFT signs, is a document of the provenance of the physical art. So? Experts get it wrong and provenance can be faked. The best thing that we've got that authenticates the physical art is the analysis and expertise that goes into its assessment - even though those assessments are occasionally wrong. They can in future be corrected. What does an NFT add to this?

There is no way, other than to actually watch the artist make the art piece in front of you and with no trickery to make sure something is in fact the original. When you realize that you'll understand why NFTs make no sense.

Authentication is just the process of other people putting their reputation on the line to claim something is in fact what it claims to be; it is not absolute proof of anything. Authentication is not the word of god.

I can't tell if you're disagreeing or agreeing with the poster you've responded to. You both seem to have made arguments for why the NFT is useless in either scenario?

> What does? ...how is that any different?

That's exactly my point. NFT's aren't any different from the scraps of paper used today.

I'm confused because by your tone it seems like you're disagreeing with me, but by what you're actually saying you're completely agreeing with me?

Because you're buying it for the object, not the peice of paper.

You seem to be using the phrase "real art" as an unstated code word for physical art, i.e. paintings, sculptures, etc.

Is photography or digital art not art?

What do you think of http://deafbeef.com. Is that not art?

In any case, I would disagree that an NFT does _nothing_ to authenticate a physical art. While, to be sure, an unscrupulous NFT holder could theoretically swap out a physical painting it is meant to represent with a fake, a holder of a claimed-to-be-original painting surely has substantially more credence to his or her claim if they also hold the non-forgable NFT that proved they acquired it in a legitimate chain of transactions.

No I'm not, I'm using it for any kind of art. I don't know what led you to believe otherwise. (I clarified "real physical art" because those are generally, though not always, sold as unique originals rather than signed replicas.)

And yes, the whole point of authentication is about unscrupulous people swapping something out. Holding an NFT lends zero additional credence precisely because that's what the fraud is -- selling the real one to someone else without the NFT, while selling a fake one to someone with the NFT, and increasing your money.

NFT's provide zero protection against such art fraud. Heck, if anything they make it even easier to perpetrate if the person buying the forged work with the non-forged NFT is led to therefore naively overlook the forgery!

I'm told that some people derive enjoyment from looking at art, particularly if nobody else can look at it. Not sure how much they'll enjoy staring at their exclusive URL...

Freeports (~storage facilities at airports) contain large amounts of boxed paintings, sculptures,... for investment purposes. No one ever looks at those. Planet Money has an episode about it [0].

[0] https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2018/02/09/584555705/epis...

Let's not kid ourselves - a lot of art transactions simply facilitate money-laundering.

NFTs probably will too, so I suppose that's at least one similarity between the two.

Fair enough, but does that investment value ultimately derive from the demand from people who do enjoy looking at the art? I would expect so, otherwise it's just a kind of collective delusion. (I haven't watched the episode, perhaps they tackle this question.)

Do you need to pay millions of dollars for the enjoyment of looking at it? You can certainly do that with just a search query or a fake copy.

I think art is as much about status as it is about enjoyment, if not more. Spending big bucks on NFTs buys you a status of a fool IMO but depends on the crowd I guess.

At the end of the day I suspect both are ripe for money laundering schemes

Amazing how almost all the commenters in every HN post about NFTs completely miss this aspect of art collecting and complain that "it's not art" or "it's pointless". With these NFTs, it's all about flipping them for a profit which will buy them whatever status they want.

Just take a look at the transaction history of any NFT going around on OpenSea. Here's an example of an NFT selling for 30ETH (~$50,000) just three days after it was bought for 1ETH (~$1690). Not affiliated with CyberKongz.

https://opensea.io/assets/0x495f947276749ce646f68ac8c2484200...

> I think art is as much about status as it is about enjoyment, if not more.

Which is exactly my point, to you, they are fools, to them, it all makes sense.

But who is them ? Art is accepted as a high class thing pretty universally. Do NFTs really compare ?

A fake copy of a classical painting looking close enough to the real one that only experts can say difference is going to cost in the high six digits at least.

If I had enough money the difference between couple of million and 50 is not all that significant I would sure pay , same as paying for apple watch or air pods or any other premium brand quality is assured and resale value is good

Do you have a source for that?

I’m no art connoisseur, but just sampling a few famous works:

Starry Night, original $80 million (https://medium.com/@comma.php/more-info-of-the-starry-night-...). Replica $500 (https://www.1st-art-gallery.com/Vincent-Van-Gogh/Starry-Nigh...)

Mona Lisa, original $850 million (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most_expensive_paintin...), replica $250 (https://www.brushwiz.com/catalog/leonardo-da-vinci-mona-lisa...)

I am no expert either, the caveat was the replica has to be close enough to not look different. The period materials and paint alone is going to be costlier $500, the hundreds of hours if not thousands (easily in $100s/hour) it is going take an expert skilled artist in recreating a master is not cheap either.

While both the links you gave claim to be hand painted, I am pretty skeptical it is possible to have an skilled artist repaint and ship in 14-21 days at a size you can choose for just $250!.

> If I had enough money the difference between couple of million and 50 is not all that significant I would sure pay

By many measures, if you had 100M$, you'd be somewhere in the top 0.001%, a million dollar would represent 1% of your net worth, but 50M$ would be 50% of your net worth, so I'm not sure where you came to the conclusion that that's not significant.

> resale value is good

Because it's the original.

Yes, to your point, resale values on lPods are dreadful.

Things that are real can be touched and experienced. Original works of art are valued because they evoke a connection to the artist. A studio recording usually sounds better than a live rendition, but people go to concerts because they want to feel a connection with the artist and the process of the art.

NFTs aren't that. They're an empty abstraction; a hollow wisp of digital chattel representing nothing. NFTs are just gaudy cash grabs and a mockery of art in any form.

> Original works of art are valued because they evoke a connection to the artist.

Sentimentally valued, yes. In the world of multimillion-dollar artworks, art is valued because it enables tax avoidance and money laundering. NFTs do that just as well.

And if the artist sells their art as an NFT? There's some aspects of performance, and some aspects of process, and a lot of aspects of connection.

I won't begrudge an artist for getting paid, but an NFT is not art, it's not a process, it's just worthless CPU cycles with no inherent connection to the art. This is why one can effortlessly create an NFT for anything, it's a distributed read-only text file that can contain arbitrary text.

An artist did a performance, minted a token, pretends the performance is linked to the token, then sells the token. An artist did a performance, wrote something on a piece of paper, pretends the performance is linked to the paper, then sells the paper.

Both case are the same thing: if one doesn’t believe the "pretend" part the token/paper is worthless. And it really is since there is no tangible connection with the performance: it’s not a token that allows to see it, nor a recording. It’s just someone pretending something. NTF as used now for digital art are a scam.

This seems to me like saying bandcamp selling MP3s is a scam, since the proof of purchase is worthless and you can get the MP3 regardless! It's technically correct and misses the entire point.

Who's out there selling ownership rights on art performances?

there's multiple artists who have sold the instructions for creating a piece of art, along with a certificate that the recreation is a verified one. that was the motivation behind the banana duct taped to a wall that garnered attention at art basel a while back.

I mean, yeah. Physical replicas of art are imperfect, and their existence doesn’t devalue the original. Even two copies of the same piece by the same painter aren’t identical.

So is photography or digital art not real art?

Here is an NFT with 128 pieces, no two of which are the same: https://www.deafbeef.com/

Or see: https://artblocks.io/

Is this not art? Or is your point simply that you can download it, so why pay for it?

If a piece of digital art ends up being valued as art, and it was created originally as an NFT, do you not think that there are collectors that would value owning the "original" (even if you do not)?

NFTs are in a bubble phase, and many of the works currently have unsustainable ridiculous valuations, but I think it's overall a good thing that digital artists can now sell collections with proven scarcity, and thus make money from it.

> digital artists can now sell collections with proven scarcity

They can't, NFT's don't change that.

Nothing stops an artist from minting a new NFT that contains or refers to exactly the same artwork.

The only thing scarcity depends on is ultimately an artist's verbal promise not to make more, which they can break whenever they want. True before NFT's, and true after NFT's.

NFTs will run their course. People are just dazzled by all the big money pumping up the hype, but there is just nothing satisfying about owning a mark in a digital ledger that has no actual connection to the work it references, it's simply not sustainable as a cultural phenomenon.

It's like paying to name a star when there's an almost infinite amount of stars.

Yes, that's a good analogy. Star registries were a passing fad, now relegated to the annals of cute novelty. All the more illustrative because even at their height, a mark in the registry was obviously not worth more than a few bucks just to say "hey, I own a star lol".

It’s exactly like ICOs. There’s something about technology that makes people just want to adopt it without realising it is just a mechanism to an end.

A NFT has no significance if it was not issued by its creator or if there are no contractual rights tied to it.

it could be sustainable if companies publically announce that they intend to defend the authenticity of their NFT. ("we released an NFT that stands for ownership of a pokemon but some dude on a website also released an NFT for that pokemon and that's not okay and we sue") A private citizen creating an NFT will never work imo, at least not if he won't defend the authenticity part of the certificate. I mean that's the entire idea of any certificate, it has to mean something similar to a university degree certificate or a food safety certificate. Somebody or something has to make sure that its supply is regulated.

A university degree or a food safety certificate are not at all like an NFT. Those types of certificates have substantive implications. A degree is a credential to signal one's expertise, a food safety certificate is a credential signaling the food meets specific standards for human consumption. Authenticity is important in these cases because it's valuable to be able to determine if the issuance of the certificate reliably correlates with what it implies. If I decide I want to hire an engineer to build a bridge, a certificate that can reliably signal they are educated in the vocation of engineering is a matter of life and death. With NFTs, authenticity is a non-issue since the NFT itself is lacking in any meaning because it has no connection to the real world.

I found this one amusing too:

NFTs, explained

https://foundation.app/0xc8f8e2f59dd95ff67c3d39109eca2e2a017...

NFTs are an interesting idea, and will find its place as soon as proponents stop pretending tokens are digital crypto art.

I misunderstood and thought his NFT was for the real Brooklyn Bridge. That was more entertaining.

I feel like someone famous could double down on this farce and "sell" an NFT they assert represents the real bridge and maybe make a quick $50k on the novelty. <headsmack>

Blockchain is actually pretty useful in the art world when it comes to provenance. That is, tracking the ownership chain of the work.

This is much more interesting than the financial hype stories, to me.

smh/fml... it's at $33k now.

they better plant forests with all these NFT money.

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