Hacker News Reader

Comment by trutannus | Hacker News Reader

Right, anyone can generate NFTs though. How does this differ from saying something like "the artist who called an empty room art is the jumping the shark moment, now I'm advocating against art at every turn"?

View on HN

Because artists haven't generally backed themselves by weaponized ASICs and a very unhealthy social scene of greed and deception (not to mention pollution)

> Because artists haven't generally backed themselves [into a] very unhealthy social scene of greed and deception

Except they absolutely have. The contemporary art market is exactly what you describe. There's sharks sitting in tanks of embalming fluid being sold for tens of millions of dollars just to be put in storage, and people laundering their money in art investment schemes. The contemporary art market is absolutely an unhealthy social scene of greed and deception.

You're absolutely right, and I personally find 'modern' art unappealing and a scam (banan on wall 30k plz), but this is because it is being used a commodity in a rotten, oligarchic financial system where we bail out corrupt bankers at the cost of the people.

With crypto, the pollution is built into the system. It's not only being used by the corruption, it is itself rotten. And neither does some of it look nice on walls.

> It's not only being used by the corruption, it is itself rotten. And neither does some of it look nice on walls.

So is the contemporary art world. The contemporary art world is vastly polluting as well. How much GHG do you think is generated to run a museum, or warehouse, transport aircraft, ect, filled with bad contemporary art?

Well, I find it as bad as you seemingly do, but I cannot deny that apparently some people like that kind of art.

This is a wild argument. You're comparing apples and anteaters.

No-one is proposing that contemporary art is some sort of technological breakthrough that will completely revamp society, make everyone rich and change finance for the rest of time.

(Also, I'm sorry, but I do NOT believe that contemporary art consume even a tiny fraction of the power that cryptocurrencies do when nearly all of it sits in a handful of warehouses and never moves, just changes ownership abstractly. You would really need to prove this claim.)

Right, but you're taking my comment out of context here. The point I'm making is that dismissing Crypto for this reason makes little sense.

At least they have the shark, and can just lock it away if they wish. Something no NFT buyer can claim.

I'd agree that a rotten shark in a tank has more substance to it than an NFT. Shame it's in embalming fluid. You could eat it if you fall on hard times otherwise.

>The contemporary art market is exactly what you describe.

Yes, there are strong parallels between the art market and the NFT market. The main one being that money laundering seems to be the primary purpose of both. But at least art does provide people with some level of subjective enjoyment beyond that.

What are weaponized ASICs?

Regular ASICs with machine guns? ASICs used for mining I suppose.

It's unclear to me how ASICs used for mining are weapons.

I suppose you could call them weapons of environmental destruction.

I suppose you could call everything produced by man weapons of environmental destruction, but that doesn't make it very useful.

You dilute the meaning of the word at that point. Weapons are specific tools that are used with intent to cause harm. If something happens to cause harm without intent, and you define it as a weapon, the word becomes useless.

You formulated it clearer and better than I did.

I suppose in the sense that concentration of mining power makes a cryptocurrency vulnerable to 51% attacks or that concentration of mining power centralizes influence and cryptocurrency in a way philosophically antithetical to the principle of decentralized cryptocurrencies.

It is my probably uncalled for hyperbole, indicating a general disdain of using silicon for running crypto shit

the fashion industry is incredibly wasteful... promotes all sorts of un-healthy lifestyle behaviors... relies on sweatshops.

Lots of art is pretty dumb, I don't advocate against it because who has time to go advocate against dumb, pointless things? Just avoid it. I'm not into art, not into NFTs, but while bumbling around in the world I've encountered enough genuinely beautiful art that I don't think the field as a whole is a joke. This isn't the case for NFTs.

On the other hand, NFTs are pretty new. Maybe someone will make a museum of NFTs that don't suck in a couple years and I'll be proven foolish.

Sotheby's is already selling them. That to me indicates they're here to stay, for better or for worse.

You literally can't make a museum of NFTs because the jpeg they point to is actually distinct from the NFT itself. A museum of NFTs would just be a giant list of hashes

I dunno. My main point was that I haven't stumbled across many interesting NFTs, but I wanted to at least leave the possibility that the medium just hasn't matured enough to create art that us non-NFT-hobbyist people would find interesting.

I'm not sure how one would curate an NFT museum, I imagine you'd want to display the jpeg and then select for pieces that play with the uniqueness guarantee somehow.

I haven't the foggiest clue how that would work, it if it is even possible, or what it would look like. But people have only been doing them for a couple years. If we made a museum that sampled the NFT population as selectively as an art museum samples the overall art population, that NFT museum would have approximately zero entries, right?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com