Wikipedia Editors Have Voted Not to Classify NFTs as Art, Sparking Outrage | Hacker News Reader

Wikipedia Editors Have Voted Not to Classify NFTs as Art, Sparking Outrage

news.artnet.com

69 pointsmwattsun35 comments

I think they made the right call.

Without delving into the usual crypto flamewar, most NFT's are a method of tracking ownership of an item. They're closer to a Certificate of Authenticity than a piece of art in and of themselves.

Even if someone put the image itself on the blockchain, I still think the blockchain serves as a storage mechanism rather than an inseparable part of the artistic work. The image could be copied off the blockchain onto a flash drive without changing the artistic value of it.

To me, the portions of a thing that are "art" are attributes that change the artistic value of a thing. The artist is an inseparable part. The frame on a painting might be an inseparable part. The location of the thing is not art, because it has the same artistic value whether it's sitting in the Louvre or in someone's attic. The NFT is like the location; it doesn't change the artistic value of anything, it only changes the monetary value of it.

There could be art where the blockchain is an inseparable part of the work, but NFT's aren't it. E.g. in architecture, the location of the building is absolutely part of the "art", even though it isn't for something like a painting.

If the artist is a very strong believer in crypto, and the art itself is mostly notable because it's an NFT, or directly references something only NFT people know, then it becomes somewhat relevant where it is.

Like, if a painting is OF the Louvre, and also in the Louvre, and the whole thing was intentional, the self reference becomes relevant.

A lot of NFTs seem to be part of a series specifically meant for blockchain. I'm sure there's at least a few blockchain specific cultural elements some include. But I don't actually pay any attention to NFTs so I don't know.

I'm not at all a NFT fan... but I don't think it's completely impossible that the location isn't part of the piece, it's almost equivalent to the frame in some cases.

I don't dispute that NFT-specific works can be art. I (and I think a lot of others) have an issue with counting a sale of the related token as a sale of the original work.

I guess (for me) it depends on whether the creation and honoring of the token was a fundamental reason for creating the art work (as mentioned by you) and comes with typical properties of ownership.

But since an NFT can be created for everything and anything (you just make a token and say it's about something), at best the NFT sale is at best something like the sale of an art copy.

It all depends on social factors. The author has to commit that an NFT will be the only one for a work; ideally the NFT would be created before the work is finished. All typical ownership rights (copyright) would have to be transferred.

Then I could see people accepting NFTs as proper certificates of ownership. But current NFTs seem to be pretty far from that (consider all the fraudulent ones).

There are NFTs where the art is entirely contained within the NFT data structure, like Autoglyphs:

https://www.larvalabs.com/autoglyphs

>>the first “on-chain” generative art

Truly the exception that proves the rule. There are, too, urinals that hang in museums as art. That repurposing of the mundane is the art; the mundane remains mundane.

The crypto community needs to slow down and understand what "Wikipedia works off of precedent" actually means.

If the crypto community wants NFTs classified as art, then they need to convince other artists, art journalists, and academics that they are art. Then, when the art community has reached sustained consensus and agrees with the crypto community that NFTs are art, Wikipedia will follow, because by design Wikipedia pays attention to the art community for judgements on what is and isn't art.

> Wikipedia is a global source of truth. Having NFTs categorized as ‘not art’ would be a disaster!

So the 'global source of truth' says that NFTs is not art and the web3 crowd take that one central source as 'the truth'. I thought web3 was supposed to be 'decentralised' and 'DAO' driven, but why not keep relying on web2 services for your definitions instead of using multiple sources that have a common definition.

I would meet both the Wikipedia editors and the NFT artists half-way and classify NFTs as contemporary art - also abbreviated as 'con-art', since literally anything can be 'art' these days.

Isn’t an NFT merely a receipt pointing to a piece of art?

As far as I understood it, the actual work is not part of the token, but hosted by a third party.

correct. The closest equivalent is a signature or certificate of authenticity from an art dealer.

except the certificate of authenticity is a dynamically generated piece of HTML, JSON, or whatever bag of bytes you can make a webserver generate.

If a cartoon drawing can be art, then NFTs can be art. "Fine art," even if it's Andy Warhol's soup can, are generally judged by a higher standard, even if the standard has to do with the concept more than the execution.

Sure, you can call anything art. But in that case, what's not art? There has to be a line drawn somewhere. Just because a bit of graphics is popular and draws in a lot of money doesn't mean diddly.

This is a hotly debated topic even before NFTs. I for one respect and agree with Wikipedia's decision.

There is a distinction for multilevel marketing schemes, I believe, that basically says if the majority of the incentive structure is about signing up new people, then it's still a pyramid scheme, even if some token product changes hands.

The law isn't there yet, but NFTs are analogous: There is some putative "art" involved, but it's basically variations of ponzi or pump-and-dump where the value comes from convincing people that the value will be higher later. The fact that something (generously) tangible is involved does not alter the nature of the scheme.

So for that reason, they are not art, the same way some phone card pyramid scheme is not a sales business.

When we say pyramid schemes are not sales businesses, or NFTs are not art, I think we sneak value judgements into what should be objective definitions. If we were to have a definition of a sales business in the dictionary, it would not read: 'A business based around sales. Except for pyramid schemes because they are bad.'

The pyramid scheme allegory was bad.

A non value judgement allegory would be receipts. Receipts are not art. You can have art of a receipt, you can make a receipt into art, but receipts are categorically not art.

NFTs are basically digital receipts.

Except the real world is messy and doesn't fall into the perfectly neat definitions like the algorithmic or mathematical world does.

An NFT is a receipt, not the artwork it points to.

A share of Getty Images stock is not art.

A baseball card is not art.

And in crypto world, anonymously "selling" an NFT to yourself is not a sale.

I'm less certain than you.

I think I read somewhere that people collect old stock certificates for the artistic value. Just checked eBay and there appear to be thousands for sale.

And aren't baseball cards art? Wouldn't Andy Warhol say they are?

Manipulating financial instruments can be art!

"[Sarah] Meyohas traded stocks on the New York Stock Exchange then, in real time, drew the changes in the stock’s valuation with oil stick on blank canvases throughout the gallery. The line, value over time, is an index of her movement, physically in the gallery and virtually in her ownership. Each painting is one of many financial records, but unique as an artwork."

She also has sold crypto tokens redeemable for her work:

"Similar to Bitcoin, one Bitchcoin, is worth 25 square inches of any one of Meyohas’ photographic prints. The value of each coin fluctuates with the increasing value of the artist’s works. ‘BitchCoin asserts artistic agency as an economic claim,” Meyohas states, "This is important for artists when art is viewed as a cultural capital"

"...when you purchase one BitchCoin, you receive a certificate with an encrypted number, which can be redeemed at any time for a physical artwork. Purchasing a complete print requires 25 BitchCoins, which comes to $2,500, but any print can be exchanged in the future for another print."

https://news.artnet.com/market/artist-invents-bitchcoin-a-ph...

NFT isn’t art, its a digital receipt vaguely related to the ownership of something in some cases.

If you buy the Mona Lisa and get a certificate of ownership with a reference to the painting, you would not say that this certificate was art.

Most NFTs are absolutely not art. The resource the NFT references may be art, but the NFT itself is just a cryptographic construct that points to some other resource. The problem here is that many who have been sucked into the NFT mania don't seem to understand that. They really do appear to believe the NFT itself is somehow the actual image or artwork it references. An NFT is not any more art than a hyperlink on the world wide web that points to a picture on a server is itself "art".

An NFT is no more art than the receipt you get whenever you buy another piece of art.

Why is that up for debate?

Because people how bought into it are trying reaaaaaaally hard to convince everyone (and mostly themselves) that they didn't get scammed.

> In the curiously designed sale, which brought in $91.8 million, 28,000 buyers bought 266,445 units of a Pak artwork that could, in theory, be combined into a single NFT owned by a single buyer worth the eye-popping, multimillion-dollar total.

Ignoring the Wiki debate... It's a bit ridiculous to count all these pieces as one piece of art because they could theoretically be owned by one person. That doesn't magically make them into one art piece.

Wikipedia isn't a "global source of truth" anyway, so i'm not sure what they're worried about. They've got serious biases and underrepresentation, and they're kind of under the control of a cabal of elite Wikipedian feudal lords who shove out the majority of outsider attempts to introduce content that doesn't fit their worldview.

See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ideological_bias_on_Wikipedia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Systemic_bias#List_o...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Academic_studies_about_Wikiped...

If the NFT is the artwork, what does that make any images that the NFT points to?

If the NFT is the artwork, can the hosting providers generously hosting images that the NFT points to rent free remove them or replace them with ads without adversely affecting the NFT?

Or is it that the NFT and hosted images together form the artwork? In which case, did you buy an artwork if you only bought the NFT portion of it? Or did you buy a share in it? And is the image itself a separate artwork in its own right, even if it was included in a combined NFT/image artwork?

Personally, I'd say a NFT sale would deserve to be on the list if the NFT sale also conferred ownership over a piece of artwork. In which case, the NFT portion is just as irrelevant as a VISA transaction receipt. Keep the artwork, sell the receipt to a sucker while they are still there. Maybe get sued for fraud by someone who thought they were buying the artwork.

Or, replying to myself, perhaps the act of buying an NFT is the artwork. Performance art. Fits all the criteria. Unfortunately for the purchaser, you can't own a performance unless you remembered to video yourself doing it. Which you could then sell an NFT of.

But is ssh-keygen randomart art? https://superuser.com/questions/22535/what-is-randomart-prod...

Yes

I would actually agree with this! An NFT is primarily a financial vehicle - that's the core purpose - albeit one that comes "decorated" with visual trappings.

For a dumb analogy, you can put a bow tie and a party hat on a stack of cash, but it's still fundamentally a stack of cash.

not surprising as this is a tech/tool to enable non-fungibility and uniqueness rather than anything specific to art[1]. in the same way that applying pencil to paper, developing generative computer programs, signing a urinal, or writing a ERC721 smart contract can all be art, this alone shouldn’t define them.

I say this as an artist working with NFTs who would be happy to see them reach wider acceptance in art/creative world.

[1] - https://mirror.xyz/0x32262672C6D1B814019f4Ca4e2fc53285a91970...

If an NFT is art then a hyperlink signed with an RSA key is "art". (read: it's not)

I see Beeple's Everydays and Pak's think are now in Wikipedia's art works list. I think it would be silly not to include Beeple's - it's obviously art and the technology of sale should not really change that.

To borrow a phrase from cooking: "Who are you to tell me what's gourmet", same applies to art, IMHO.

"Everyone's screwing your wife but you can't do shit about it.

But you have your marriage certificate, that's your NFT..."

This again? If someone and their partner have incompatible expectations or boundaries then they should break up.

An NFT can be performance art if created intentionally as a dramaturgical action in the crypto theater.

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