Hello,
when I first heard about NFTs at the beginning of the hype I was relatively positive. My wife is an artist and art theft is a big problem. When someone sells you a painting you don’t know if it really belongs to them and you have to ask the artist yourself. With increasing purchases and sales it becomes difficult/impossible to investigate this and the databases of the platforms on which you can offer art are very incomplete, of course, they only record transactions on their own site.
So I was very taken with the idea of storing the image in the blockchain and thus recording the owner of an image for all to see in an unmanipulable database. Art theft would be defeated. Each time the artwork is purchased, the image would have changed hands on the chain and all questions about the actual owner would be resolved. If you wanted to have little to do with the blockchain you could have sent the image offchain and used the onchain image only as a confirmation of authenticity.
Accordingly, I am disappointed with the subsequent development. What you (I’m writing from an outsider’s perspective to much of the NFT community) don’t seem to understand is that just because an image is on the blockchain it doesn’t suddenly have many times its former value. An image for 100$/€ is not suddenly worth millions. It is still only 100$/€+ the small transaction fee of the image.
The only thing that could give value to collections like the Monkeys or Punks is that they exist only in a certain number, but rarity is only an indicator of value, not the main reason. You can argue about art and aesthetics, but I doubt that anyone really wants to argue that the monkeys/punks are worth hundreds of thousands without speculating. Otherwise, even now more people would be interested in these images.
Because of the massive hype and speculation, the traditional digital art market was flooded with NFTs, as were artists with requests to make NFTs. As a result, NFTs were completely banned on most of these sites.
By gambling and not understanding art, you have brought the technology into such disrepute that the art scene will never use it to finally fix its oldest problem, and neither the scene nor the originators realize what they are missing.
Most unfortunate, have fun with your pictures.
I agree with part of the observation but disagree wholly with your conclusion. It is much harder to see past the surface if you never participate and dive in. The fact is, there are some forms of art that for a long time are difficult to represent in a traditional space that are not profile pic collections that have found collector bases in the nft space. There are a lot of artists globally that have found representation in the space because the currency may be more accessible to them than the usd. Third, increased financial exposure to secondary markets by platforms that uphold royalties is attractive to artists.
Nah, it’s just a typical wave. NFTs got overheated, scammers came in, etc. Now everyone’s pissed, but they won’t stay pissed – there will be a next evolution in the NFT market, and it will address some of the issues of the past. For example, the arrival of very quality games, or a working usecase of digital deeds
I think narratives around NFTs are changing. We are now having what we call dynamic nfts; fractionalized/shared nfts. NFTs for specific purposes, like an event, or membership, etc. Unique Network is bringing some of these to polkadot. They seem interesting. I see some cool nfts on solana as well.
I was frustrated when I first tried to get into NFTs, but then I discovered the Tezos blockchain. In the Tezos ecosysytem you will find true artist communities. I managed to start my art collection using very little money. I also manage to sell some of my NFTs using the innovative fxhash site which uses JavaScript to generate art. This requires some real technical skill and that keeps out the get-rich-quick scammers.
There is still a lot for me to learn. For example, I still have not found a virtual art gallery application which works. Then there are analytics for NFTs which are very sophisticated tools for investors.
The best thing about NFT is that is provides some incentive. Nobody does great things to meet their potential without some incentive. I have been dabbling for four years on my creative coding experiments. But only now have I been inclined to make improvements to some of my experiments and realize some projects that before I merely contemplated.
Completely agreed and this is exactly one of the reasons me and my project partner decided to complement our posters with an NFT.
In my opinion NFTs should be used to provide digital proof of a physical object in most cases, with of course some being typical collector NFTs! Hopefully with the recent events people will realise this and we will see more utility…
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