“But I can just look at a JPEG online.”

This is a well worn path and a lot of actors engage in it, but it isn't really about altruism. It's about return. The difference between holding a real Mona Lisa and holding a forgery is that you know for certain that every molecule of light reflects as it did. That the very materials used by the artist are still there. This is not the case with NFTs.

To me NFTs sound self-contradictory, the digital world is inherently fungible and discrete. That's why computers can exist and you and me can be sure the same sequence of bytes gets executed in the same way on different computers.

The only uniqueness here exists in whatever specific public ledger implementation you decide is worthy, and you better hope it will still exist in 20 years, along with the link to the wordpress blog where your jpeg actually exists. Or maybe it's embedded on the actual chain now as they did with those 8 bit spaceship pictures, who knows. Old man yells at cloud, and I'm not even old yet.

Of course, the "downside" of this is that I couldn't get rich in a random gambling game where, for some reason, someone wants to pay me 100x what I paid to "own" the artwork. To me, NFTs don't represent valuing art so much as they represent gambling games. If I value art, I will pay the artist. I don't need a blockchain.

Personally I prefer the patron model for creators of all sorts, including artists. It lets me support the creation of further art without the pretense of someone claiming ownership over a string of ones and zeroes.

"By choosing to value beauty, you are making a statement about its importance in your personal priorities, values, and hierarchy of needs."

People flipping art and holding assets on port docks to dodge taxes is valuing beauty?

The first time I saw a masterpiece in person, despite that I'd seen the image probably thousands of times preceding that, the experience was amazing. It totally took me by surprise. Looking at a jpeg, or even a printed reproduction, isn't even in the same ballpark.

"The JPEG you can find online is just 1920x1080 or whatever. If you don't go to the museum that owns it, you will never see it in its original 8K on a 72" screen, man!"

But, you know, the analog of this doesn't always apply to traditional works. Often does, but not always.

The first time I laid eyes on Van Gogh's Sunflowers (the real item), I could hardly believe my eyes. That picture is freakin' tiny, and the colors are so bad from aging. It's just this brown, sad thing. It doesn't look anything like its reproduction you might see in a decent quality art book.

This thing needs to be scanned at a high resolution, processed, and turned into a decent quality JPEG just so you can see it properly. :)

It's your money though, I certainly pass no umbrage with how you spend it.

> The value of an asset gives incentive to collectors, but it’s not the point. It’s supporting the artist who created it to enable them to make more and sustain a career.

Nothing about NFTs makes this easier. NFTs don't make it easier to donate money to an artist, their only innovation on top of the existing system is that they create an asset that might increase in value for the owner. That's it. NFTs provide nothing other than incentive to collectors, that is exactly the point, there's nothing else of substance to them that could be the point.

> Can you do that by looking at a reproduction of the original JPEG?

I hear this argument a lot, and I sometimes wonder whether or not peopele really understand that NFTs are NOT the original JPEG. NFTs have no relation to the original JPEG, they're something that gets created after the fact.

Buying an NFT is not the same as buying an original painting, when you buy an NFT, you are buying a token -- not the original token, not a token that is intrinsically linked to the creation of a piece of artwork -- a token that is created after the fact that has no fundamental link to "original" or "unique" qualities of the artwork itself.

In fact, when you look at an NFT, you are necessarily always looking at a reproduction of the original JPEG, because that's how the Internet works. What gets transmitted to your computer from the hashed link or reference in the NFT is a reproduction of a reproduction. 100% of the time.

So the comparisons to buying a physical piece of artwork are absurd; this is nothing like going to a museum and looking at an original piece of work. There is no lighting or quality difference between an NFT and a normal JPEG like you would see at a museum. There also is no spiritual or emotional difference, because you can't look at an NFT and say something like "these were the bytes that were made."

In terms of the artwork itself, buying an NFT is the same as buying a reproduction of the Mona Lisa at a gift shop. The token itself has no connection to the original artwork beyond a link/hash and the identity of the person who minted it. And if that's enough of a connection for you, fine. But what you're buying is a poster reproduction with a certificate from the copyright holder. There is no spiritual or physical connection to the "original" JPEG happening here.

The full quote is below:

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> The argument is easily dismissed when you understand why owning art is essential. It’s not holding it that matters. The value of an asset gives incentive to collectors, but it’s not the point. It’s supporting the artist who created it to enable them to make more and sustain a career. Because without that, we simply don’t have art.

It feels like a symptom of our current scarcity-obsessed society that the author so sincerely and immediately connects "supporting the artist" with "owning art". There's no attempt to explain why support can only be expressed through owning a scarce asset, and I think the author doesn't take the time to explain that because it may have genuinely never occurred to them that there are ways to interact with an artistic ecosystem that aren't based around property, ownership, and exclusivity.

Often when I talk to people about NFTs, I find that this bias in their philosophy about how art works and about the essential nature of ownership over the world blocks their ability to evaluate what the technology really is and what is actually happening when they buy an NFT.

NFTs are really only an innovation if you have a worldview that states that the only way to appreciate and foster beauty is to own it and to exclude it from the world around you. The people who have that worldview could always have been commissioning and donating to artists. Doing so would have given them a much more direct, moral and/or spiritual link to the creative process of the artist.

But also in a strange way they couldn't do that, because that concept is foreign to them. In their mind, an artistic piece that can't be owned, traded, bought, and sold almost doesn't exist. They look at the increased availability of the Internet and view that increased access as inherently cheapening art, and so they look at NFTs as a kind of savior technology that pushes artwork back into the realm of something that can be coveted and speculated on, which to them is more fundamentally "real". They are incapable of separating beauty from exclusivity.

Of course, NFTs are also a poor system even for their intended goal of increasing scarcity: the technology is flimsy and disconnected from reality, and it's too easy for artists to flood the market (sometimes not even with their own artwork). But even with its flaws, there are certain people with this mindset who still flock to NFTs because to them it promises to make art "real" again, and to move artwork back into a realm that they understand and can interact with in the only way that they know.