[b3morales]

> And amidst the flurry of insanity in NFT world, there is some genuinely good art being created. ... The whole game around who gets to pay a stupid amount of money to say they own it of them doesn't diminish the fact that art has been created, and the art can be enjoyed anyone.

It is good art, and thanks for the link, I hadn't heard of them before.

But I don't see what the NFT aspect adds. They've been creating art for years. Are they creating more art because of NFTs? What's the practical difference in outcome for the artist between selling an NFT and selling a print?

[danielvf]

Yes, some people are selling a lot more art because of NFTs.

For one thing, there's only so much space on your walls for prints, but a huge enormous amount of space in your wallet to hold NFTs. Whales / superfans can spend even more than they otherwise could - which isn't a bad thing for artists.

Another thing is the immediacy of selling. Tweet little corners of something while you make something, tweet about it when it is done, and one or two days later when the auction ends, you have money. A whole of of the friction and delay is gone.

On the other hand, super fast distribution, and direct artist to buyer "connection" on a mass scale means that to make the mega-bucks requires being something like a music star or an instagram / reality star celebrity. Or maybe it's like YouTube / twitch. There are a lot of creators, and some percentage of those creators have massive audiences and some have ten people. Or zero. That kind of change we've seen before in other types of art, and now it's coming here. There are a lot of people who have made NFT's that have never seen a sale. It's not a magic money tree.

[kibwen]

> For one thing, there's only so much space on your walls for prints, but a huge enormous amount of space in your wallet to hold NFTs. Whales / superfans can spend even more than they otherwise could - which isn't a bad thing for artists.

This is quite silly. Digital art has been a thing for years. By raw numbers, the majority of independent artists these days make a living doing digital art commissions. And yes, to whales; I have multiple artist friends who make an absolute killing drawing one-of-a-kind commissioned pornography (furries are loaded!). NFTs did not invent digital art or the digital art market, it's just that techbros are finally realizing it exists now that it's possible to attach cryptocurrency scams to art.

[iskander]

You can make art according to your own creative impulses (and get paid for that) or...you can make commissioned porn for furries. Choose wisely.

[miracle2k]

Cool! So now there is one more way, especially for artists you'd rather not do commissions.

[bonestamp2]

> But I don't see what the NFT aspect adds.

It's a very good question, and the answer was conveniently left out of the blog post at hand. The reason art NFTs were created to begin with was because in the traditional art world, the people who make nearly all of the money are not the people who actually make the art. It is the art dealers and the art collectors who take the lion's share of the money.

The purpose of putting art in an NFT is to better balance the economics of art so that when the dealers and collectors continue to sell the art for increasingly higher prices, the original artist also gets some of the financial reward. This is especially important for young artists who are talented but are not yet able to sell their originals for a liveable wage or get any interest in a distributor to make prints.

A lot of people think NFTs are a waste of time and money, and I completely understand that paradigm, but NFTs are very important to the Artists who are trying to make a living wage from their passion. Ideally, this will contribute to even more imaginative art in the future.

I'd argue that Art NFTs actually share the values of open source software that were listed in the article, at least when it comes to improving "abundance, post-scarcity, universal access, and equality" for artists.

[wpietri]

There's no particular evidence that NFTs will change the economics of art. Indeed, given the rich history of scams, money laundering, grift, and fraud in the fungible token space, I'd say there's good reason to think artist will end up at least as screwed over. Indeed, given that the traditional art world will be eager to get in on it, it could be worse.

> Art NFTs actually share the values of open source [...] improving "abundance, post-scarcity, universal access, and equality"

This is flatly wrong. The whole point of an NFT is to create artificial scarcity in a post-scarcity medium. And it is the sort of "up is really down" crypto promotion that has turned me into a reflexive skeptic.

[bonestamp2]

> The whole point of an NFT is to create artificial scarcity in a post-scarcity medium.

That's not true for art NFTs. If you don't own the rights to an image, whether it's a regular old bitmap or an art NFT, there's no difference in scarcity as an observer of that image. But, as the artist who created a digital image vs an art NFT, there's a massive difference, and THAT is the whole point of an art NFT.

[wpietri]

Nah. A post-scarcity, open-source-like solution is letting people sponsor art creation. An NFT is creating artificial scarcity: one person thinks they "own" a digital asset. And there's plenty of agita when people don't play pretend with them: https://mashable.com/article/non-fungible-tokens-nfts-right-...

[bonestamp2]

> An NFT is creating artificial scarcity: one person thinks they "own" a digital asset.

This is true for most digital images, NFT or not... one person usually does own it. In either case, there is no scarcity for observers -- anyone can look at the image as much as they want.

In both cases, people can even copy the image and it use it without the owner's permission, if that's what you're really concerned about losing. But at least the NFT makes it very clear who that owner is, for those who do seek permission or licensing (unlike your average jpeg). For anyone who believes in intellectual property, that seems like a step forward.

[wpietri]

Yes, NFTs are like other images in that respect, which makes them even more pointless. And also worse, in that the ownership is less reliable and subject to far more terms and conditions than regular ownership.

But regardless, you make my point for me. It's just as illegal to copy somebody's NFT'd JPEG as it is any other privately owned JPEG. NFTs do not "share the values of open source software", which is about making it legal for people to freely use IP, more or less the opposite of the sort of free-market fundamentalist "who believes in intellectual property".

[damon_c]

> What's the practical difference in outcome for the artist between selling an NFT and selling a print?

With NFTs, the artist gets the money before they're dead!

[vkou]

What stops me from getting paid for selling an NFT of your art?

[iskander]

It wouldn't have any value for lack of actual provenance (you can test this by trying to sell your own copy of Fidenza, please report back).

[vkou]

What part of the NFT protocol verifies provenance?

And why did this not work for Davidson Carvalho, who hasn't seen a cent of the money made by someone selling NFTs of his work? If there was no provenance, why did anyone pay $170,000 for them? [1]

Could it be the case that the NFT market doesn't give two figs about provenance?

[1] https://twitter.com/colorblindmess/status/145059819884259328...

[iskander]

Social interpretation of the contract that the token is attached to.

e.g. if your Art Blocks NFT is on the Art Blocks contract, it's authentic. If it's the same image on a different contract, it's inauthentic.

Just saw your edit: now that it's known that the art is stolen from a different artist, I would expect the original NFTs to lose most if not all of their value. The convention of authenticity is a social one. If an artist misrepresents art as their own then it seems authentically theirs until shown otherwise. Same as e.g. selling prints of someone else's work.

[JeremyNT]

> Social interpretation of the contract that the token is attached to.

So if the value of NFTs only exists because of a "social contract," what good are they? I could just pay the artist $1M for a normal JPEG they will send me via email (and for my money, an actual JPEG seems like it would be way more useful than a cryptographic hash of a URL to the JPEG).

In neither case do you "own" anything in a real sense, you have an artist communicating that you have exclusive rights to a bucket of bits.

The only value I can comprehend in all this is that of the ledger's utility in facilitating trading on the secondary market (since the artist doesn't need to go and vouch for everybody who eventually buys/sells the ownership stake in the bag of bits in the future).

It all feels gross to me. I can certainly appreciate that artists have to make a living, but the idea that the best way to do this is to crank out digital certificates to confirm somebody "owns" their work (but only in the sense that the "owner" can trade and speculate on that ownership stake) strikes me as bizarre and dystopian.

[vkou]

> I would expect the original NFTs to lose most if not all of their value.

Since crypto trading operates on the principle of offloading to a bigger fool, this does not seem like a sufficient disincentive. The original seller and the next N people to pass that hot potato around made money.