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Comment by purple_ferret | Hacker News Reader

Steph Curry 'bought' an NFT, made it his avatar, asked about getting into crypto, and then immediately announced he had a deal with FTX to be a sponsor/investor (coincidentally right after another FTX celebrity sponsor, Tom Brady, replied to his tweets about crypto).

It wasn't purchased by Steph Curry on a whim as a status symbol. It was probably given to him as part of his roll out deal with FTX.

It's nearly the same roll out move every other FTX celebrity sponsor has made, of which, there are now many. They get paid to act like they're interested.

None of this is organic. It is all a sham.

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I’m not so sure it’s complete bs. Ive worked with Steph on a dozen design projects through his brand. Typically I’m actually only interfacing with his team so I’ve only met him personally a few times and only for a few minutes. The last project I got to meet him again at the roll out. I pitched the idea of creating NFTs for his foundation to the guy running his foundation. The guy was totally interested. A few seconds later Steph walked by (and wasn’t being mobbed by everyone around) and the guy told Steph “this guys talking about NFTs” … Steph did a triple take and eyes wide and seemed genuinely juiced to talk about it. Moments later he got mobbed by kids for autographs and that was it.

Not saying NFTs are not a sham, just that I was super surprised at how interested he seemed in the subject.

> I pitched the idea of creating NFTs

> Not saying NFTs are not a sham

How do these two statements go hand in hand?

“I pitched the idea of created an app that people would want”

“Not saying apps are a sham”

… I don’t understand how those two sentences are contrary in your thinking. What do you see?

You missed a "not" in your second sentence.

The art world itself in some ways could be a sham. But also there is real art and business happening.

The art world is definitely a sham(1). That doesn't mean there isn't money making opportunity, nor does it mean there isn't intrinsic value in artwork; if anything it tends to mean there are outsized winners and losers that are divorced from any intrinsic value of the art.

(1)Consider all the artists "unrecognized" during their lifetime; did their genius just get discovered after their deaths? No, it was just at that point their works were a limited commodity, and not well distributed yet, and so suddenly became good places to park wealth. That isn't to say there isn't good and interesting and thought provoking work being done, but it's definitely only loosely, if at all, correlated to price. A good artist with nothing else can expect to sell a custom painting for $1k, tops. A hack artist with a known PR person in the art world can get themselves selling them for hundreds of thousands, if not millions.

>A good artist with nothing else can expect to sell a custom painting for $1k, tops.

That's not really right, my wife is a painter without gallery representation who sells in $5k-$12k range. Through her I've met many other people in this "middle tier". A well connected gallery can get collector eyes on your art at fairs like Art Basel and further increase the price of paintings to the higher tens of thousands. Beyond that, there's a relatively small circle of prominent living artists selling for $100k-$1M; these are mostly talented hard working people with distinctive styles that find an eager collector audience. The tier beyond that is an even smaller group of "celebrity" artists -- which is maybe who you're referring to as "hack artists" since it includes some gimmicky work.

That, or somebody just laundered 180k bucks.

Why not both?

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