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Comment by piotrkaminski | Hacker News Reader

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...

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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.

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.

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

> 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 ?

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...

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