The one problem NFTs solve perfectly: How to do decentralized and pseudonymous proof of community membership.
Successful projects like Bored Ape Yacht Club are not about the fancy drawings, but about the exclusivity of a social club. You may find that silly, but that does not diminish the human craving for status.
NFTs are the digital equivalent of designer clothes, luxury watches, and fancy cars.
Your point that they are status markers has something, though! Especially given how most of the successful work seems to be operating under completely different aesthetics than those non-filthy-rich people enjoy looking at and funding (seriously all these randomly-generated things are ugly); the "fine art" world has had increasing amounts of work that you have to be trained to see as "good art" ever since photography made accurate depictions of a scene something everyone could have for very little effort.
This was long-winded, but all I'm saying is that I think generated art is an interesting medium, with both good and bad artists and good and bad pieces, like every other artistic medium. (Again, completely without taking a position on whether NFTs are the right way to create / sell these!)
I feel like a lot of people (particularly on this site) see these kinds of things as shallow, uninteresting, and contributory to a lot of the worst parts of society. It feels… odd… to hear them invoked as a positive/useful thing.
Like, yes, I get it, a lot of people are shallow and want status symbols to fill the voids in their souls and give their lives meaning. But the idea of taking the clout-chasing mechanics that wreak so much havoc on society and going “what if we had more of that?”… well it feels a little like trying to invent digital junk food because real world junk food sells so well.
https://www.fon.hum.uva.nl/rob/Courses/InformationInSpeech/C...
With NFTs, their functionality extends through programmability, where they can be used as collateral for self-executing financial contracts.
Scarcity can't be both genuine and artificially imposed.
Luxury sunglasses costing $3 to make are sold for $300.
> "designer clothes, luxury watches, and fancy cars" all have understandable limits to production and have genuine scarcity (even if that scarcity is strictly controlled).
For digital art vs physical art, there is a clear difference between "there will only ever be one mona lisa" and "I am not going to press cntrl-c cntrl-v on this image license"
Personally, id be ecstatic if collectors decide they can get their fix collecting rare jpegs and Pokémon cards instead of “truly scare” ivory, furs, or blood diamonds.
What’s the harm? What am I missing?
I take issue with systems which exploit gambling urges for profit. NFT's claim to be the future of DRM for independent artists, but they are exploited into becoming pump-and-dump schemes and wildly speculative markets. They use language used to defend artistic IP but ultimately function as a game with arbitrary rules.
It's all well and good to talk about designer watches that are perfectly constructed masterpieces, but NFTs aint that. They're the $3 mass-produced digital watches that are getting a brand slapped on them and then sold purely for the name. The only thing more mass-produced than the bored ape collection are the silly pixel avatars on Twitter; we're not really talking about significant skill or craftmanship or even creative expression here. Zoom in on some of the images in the bored app collection, the artist is very literally copying and pasting parts of the drawing between pictures, that's why they all look the same.
It just feels really silly to try and artistically compare some cookie-cutter Photoshop templates to a hand-crafted watch.
Nonsense. NFTs are neither mass-produced digital watches nor Rolexes. They are simple watches - some mass produced and some artworks created by skilled craftsmen.
Then how many of the highest-selling NFTs of all time are cryptopunks?
But the Cryptopunks are, generative and a collectible yes, but by all accounts a labour of love, an experiment before its time, given away for free at a time when no one gave a damn; it's not exactly the mass-production story you suggest.
Just for the benefit of anyone else looking in on this, these are cryptopunks: https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ffab&q=cryptopunk&iax=images&ia=im...
Even if you buy wholesale into the narrative about the history of cryptopunks (and to be clear, this is a deliberately chosen narrative, the cryptopunk creators were not against making money and they gave away a large percentage of their tokens in part because they hoped the tokens they held would increase in value if they became more popular) -- but even if you take everything about their history at face value, you're still left with:
A) Pieces that do not have much artistic value outside of their position and relevance inside the ecosystem in which they were created: nobody is going to seriously claim that cryptopunks are themselves great works of art, any artistic value comes from the creation of the NFT model for generative/mass-produced artwork,
B) Pieces that are definitively mass-produced by design, and that served as a template for how other mass-produced collections could work,
C) Pieces that have been largely divorced from any artistic message that the original pieces held; the evolution of a piece designed to evoke a counter-cultural punk aesthetic into a piece that can only be controlled and owned by the richest members of society is its own possibly unintentional statement on the state of NFTs, and
D) Pieces that are significant specifically because they formed a model for other even more derivative pieces by other creators who lack even the benefit of imagination about the crypto-ecosystem itself. Cryptopunks are significant because they proved the viability of other collections like bored apes and their ilk, products that are entirely devoid of any kind of meaningful social statement or craftmanship. And one has to wonder what the actual artistic value or craftmanship is in building that model and why we should be impressed with the creators behind it.
And even if you're optimistic about all of this and think the pieces are genuinely significant and meaningful, you still wouldn't compare cryptopunks to a hand-crafted watch. They're at best historically significant, but they don't demonstrate any particularly breathtaking artistic skill, and any artistic message they were trying to make has been largely invalidated by the evolution of the space into the least "punk" community in tech. The nicest thing I can say about cryptopunks is that they have inadvertently turned into an effective satire of what the NFT community thinks about itself.
I think this is a limited definition of what an NFT can be.
If it's for exclusivity, why hide your identity? Is a list of members the club maintains not good enough?
I've come round to the position that NFTs are not going away precisely because of this, despite not agreeing with the value proposition myself.
Which strictly speaking is about the art being "stolen", not the NFT.
My personal view here is that your continued ability to own an NFT depends on your ability to tell an interesting story.
If 51% of the professional clout of the art world decides you don't own something any more, you ... might not?
If the metadata that denote ownership of beeple's first 5000 everydays are accidentally overwritten due to a small bug, probably everyone will agree to ignore that.
But if someone puts on a super cool art-thief costume and does a livestream where they write and execute software that resets the ownership so it's their art now, while they play "The Thomas Crown Affair" soundtrack in the background, probably everyone will go along with this, yeah?
(Certainly the theft of the Mona Lisa increased its value!)
This requires some social contract to know who the authority is, and that's probably based on how much they have spent on marketing to become The Authority.
It always comes back to social contracts.
if there are 20 NFT chains, and 10 of them assign ownership to A, and 5 of them assign it to B and the other 5 don't assign it at all - what can we say anymore about the ownership?
all of this public ledger stuff might make more sense if, unlike as is customary, there is a single authoritative chain instead of a 'marketplace' of chains.
Once you get that, everything makes sense, from why bitcoin has value to the point of NFTs.
It's worth taking time to think about it until it at least makes sense what's happening, even if you don't choose to participate yourself.
It was funny to see how they responded to losing their NFTs by being tricked on discord: they contacted the centralized storefronts (rarible, opensea) to have them marked as stolen.