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Comment by hobs | Hacker News Reader

>Now imagine if an artist makes a digital painting. Is that work of art any less meaningful or valuable? Of course not.

Of course yes it is - its less valuable after it is created because copying it costs nothing.

Valuing a work above the creation cost of the work is what the art world certainly does, but replicas of the art are still valuable for being appealing and taking some work to create - a digital version is appealing but takes so little work to create and store that its hard to justify the rest of the collective delusion.

Adding scarcity to non-scarce things is just stupid.

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You appear to be assuming that painting something with a brush is substantially more time consuming than painting something with a drawing tablet. Other than maybe mixing the paint and letting it dry, the effort seems to be able to same

My sentence might be a little confusing - I don't believe that - when I say create the digital version I mean the copy - the initial act of creation (imo) is still highly valued because it creates something from nothing digitally or not, pixels or not.

A marble sculptor shouldn't be valued more than a digital sculptor, its really just about time and effort either way.

The difference is not in the original but in the copies. A copy of a painting can be a work of art, but it is different. It did not sit at the artists' atelier, it hasn't traveled through different places to finally hang at the buyer's living room.

That is not the case for digital works. If we get strict about it, everything apart from the original file sitting in the artists' computer disks are copies. The file you downloaded after purchasing your "original" is a copy.

But well, whatever makes people happy.

Is a bronze sculpture an "original"? (It's likely been done by a professional foundry, that created a mold from the artists template)

Presumably the bronze sculpture was still produced with the authorization of the artist in a limited series and thus still represents their original work and intent. I think the key difference is that viewing a sculpture doesn't implicitly grant me a perfect replica of said sculpture that I would be free to save, duplicate, and even mint my own NFT for were I so inclined. Digital objects are not scarce in the way that physical objects are.

If the artist says their NFT (not anybody elses, the one signed by them!) represents (or is) their original work and intent, that doesn't count?

That depends. If that sculpture survived decades or centuries and then put on display in a museum far removed from the ability to recreate that sculpture from the original molds, then in a way, yes, it is an original.

However, if the molds are still available and another can be cast and finished, then no.

Still a specific instance of an unoriginal item might be special. It could have been painted post-casting by someone famous, or survived a war or shipwreck, and so forth. Originality is now no longer a distinguishing aspect of the sculpture's value.

> A copy of a painting can be a work of art, but it is different. It did not sit at the artists' atelier, it hasn't traveled through different places to finally hang at the buyer's living room.

Yes, and a copy of a digital work still has some value, but there's only one NFT that the artist issued to represent ownership of the digital work. These are precisely identical stories. Even if you could create a physical copy of a physical painting with arbitrarily high fidelity (perhaps at the atomic level), there would still only be one painting that sat in the artist's studio, and I suspect the art world would still only value that one as the original.

In other words, the fidelity with which one can create copies of an original work is irrelevant to the determination and valuation of originality.

There's something here which I'm not following. are you equating the timeeffortskill with the value? It seems like you might be interpreting the word "value" in a different way than the previous comment meant.

> Adding scarcity to non-scarce things is just stupid.

This is the best lesson. People who try to add artificial scarcity will eventually be proven wrong (but con men have existed in all eras).

> Of course yes it is - its less valuable after it is created because copying it costs nothing.

I think you can apply that same argument to something like a normal painting. Sure, the price for making copy isn’t zero, but it’s practically zero when comparing to the millions of dollars that the most expensive paintings are sold for. So why do people pay so much then? Because they want the original. That also applies for wanting to own the original version of a digital painting.

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