Coincidentally, my younger sister was just asking me about this on Saturday. She has a degree in fine arts (maybe a Masters, I’m really not sure) and a mountain of debt from obtaining that education. She asked if I had thought of trying to sell some of my pixel art this way. I hadn’t heard of it, so she sent me some info that she had about it and told me that she put a piece up through Rarible. It cost her $40 to list it. So far no buyers.
I told her, “I’ll look into it, but I don’t know. I may be too old for this new fangled art.”
And yeah. I think this might be the threshold where my old brain just goes, “No,” For my dad it was programming the VCR. For me it’s crypto-based art buying and trading.
I will be sending her a link to that article about the ecological cost of CryptoArt that @Andrew_Glasgow posted above as well, so she can draw her own conclusions.
You buy the NFT, not the artwork. The art is just the pretty picture that is associated with that NFT within a certain restricted ecosystem.
The bits that make up the picture itself can still be pulled to anyone’s hardrive to be viewed and copied and shared and whatever. There’s nothing inside those bits that is associated with the NFT in question.
Right. If I get the sponsorship, my next installation will be 1500 Ford F-150s idling for a year.
I think I’ll call it ‘Climate change is real, dude!’.
“An artist can “tokenize” a piece of work and then sell it, and the buyer can prove that what they just bought is the original thing sold by the artist.”
I have been loitering around modding/virtual world communities for decades. Lately, it’s more often the real creator that is generally being served with the DMCA that was filed by pirates. Same with “stock” sites, where you can find multiple copies of the same image being sold by different users, none of whom actually created the image.
What keeps people from taking your art and doing this with it? This seems like a way for people to claim things are their creation, but there’s no actual reason they’d have to have been the original creator to do this, is there?
The idea of NFTs reminds me of Joseph Weizenbaum’s observations how people around him got so enthralled by computers they constantly tended to confound the virtual with the real, Eliza with a psychiatrist.
I think there is definitely a value to digital ‘assets’ but OTOH our digital life is a house of cards.
The blockchain and proof-of-work is also primitive in the sense that essentially what you do is ascribing value to amount of energy wasted. You could as well heat a warehouse with a bunch of resistive space heaters, hand the proof-of-purchase for the electricity to a clearing house, and allow them to trade that piece of paper in a stock market of sorts.
You could have used the same amount of energy to make people’s lives better (like heating homeless shelters or run a production line for stuff) but you chose to vent all of that into our already heating atmosphere.
As a reward people admire you for being so avant-guarde, so digital, so clever, and you may get rich. We moan at the sight of environmental destruction that our species’ insatiable appetite for mineral resources inflicts on the planet but you managed to cut out the middle man, all the dirty physical production stuff. Blockchain is the most efficient polluter on Earth. Not unlike a heat pump, it generates wealth on one end for a very few, at the expense of exhausting heat and CO2 on the other, for everyone to suffer from, socializing the incidentals. Well played, very clever.
Perhaps Van Gogh was not the best choice of example - because he didn’t (couldn’t) sell a single work in his entire life. His worth became apparent only after his wife’s struggle to get his works appreciated after his death.
It’s perhaps worth noting that blockchains don’t have to use proof-of-work, even though Bitcoin and most cryptocurrencies do because Satoshi Nakamoto’s white paper laid out a scheme that relied on their combination.
While a distributed blockchain still necessarily uses more computation and therefore energy than a centralized ledger, by far the stupefyingly wasteful energy hog in cryptocurrency is the proof-of-work requirement.
Here’s a basic overview if you can stomach the author using architect as a verb…
And here’s a scientific article for anyone that wants a more technical treatment…
The more I think about it, the more this just seems like a one-off crypto-coin. The non-fungible part just means that the trails value for that coin is set on an individual basis and not in a consistent market. So yeah, it is really a way to hide wealth.
How right you are. Thanks for the clarification:
“Theo died just two months after his brother. It was Johanna, the mother of a new baby boy named Vincent, who took it upon herself to introduce Van Gogh’s paintings to the world.”
I suppose she had good incentive to flog a few pictures too.
I mean, instead of coming up with schemes to help artists survive after they’re no longer popular that make everyone else’s lives worse, why don’t they do something sensible that helps everyone like help implement UBI?
I have to echo what others have said already, the environmental impact of minting art on the blockchain is extremely high and something we should mention anytime we talk about CryptoArt. Some artists are trying to offset this by requiring equal carbon offsets to be purchased along with each purchase of one of their NFT pieces, but carbon offsets really don’t address the issue. At least the bring the issue up though so people can think about the ecological costs associated with NFTs. Some really informative pieces I’ve read include:
There’s a lot of fascinating things to talk about when we talk about CryptoArt (ie scarcity, artists getting paid, what is ownership) but we can’t leave the main topic off the table.
