| I don’t know about other people and their misconceptions. I hope (and think) they are not as widespread as you think. But yeah I think of NFTs as a novel way to support digital art. Not much else, just pay the artist. Same as buying a painting really, except you don’t really own the painting anymore. The idea that buying art is anything BUT supporting an artist is pretty funny. It’s as if we’ve normalised art as either an investment or a museum that we can’t touch. Buying art was always meant to just let the artist do his thing! Selling digital art before NFTs was a complete pain! Before them you had to go with an agency or gallery, they took a cut, they had to like your stuff. It was absolutely painful, full of gate keeping and bullshit I (and many others) hated. Now you just mint (hopefully on a low carbon chain) and off you go, you tweet about it, get some attention, make some money. It’s simple. The fact that there’s a secondary market for it, well there always was one for art. It certainly attracted a bunch of rubes who buy ape JPEGs but there is an honest revolution in digital art happening right now. Look into FXhash on tezos, I’ve lost count of the amount of generative art on that market and it’s really really mind blowing. People are coding amazing stuff on there and selling it, something which used to be virtually impossible without a gallery and a rep and a bunch of nonsense. I think an NFT is a form of DRM that doesn’t enforce scarcity - ie you own A license to that artwork but that doesn’t give you the right to it. That license can be bought and sold, maybe eventually that will have value (my personal favourite is that NFTs should allow you to remix the artwork into your own art, but who knows). |
Traditionally people bought art to possess it, look at it, and display it for others.
> Buying art was always meant to just let the artist do his thing!
No, that's kinda what patronage was all about. We have crowd sourced versions of that.
> Selling digital art before NFTs was a complete pain! Before them you had to go with an agency or gallery, they took a cut, they had to like your stuff.
That wasn't necessary though, you could sell art all sorts of ways. You could even just set up your own online store if you wanted. All NFTs seem to have done is take advantage of the hype-chasing and speculation crowds.
> there is an honest revolution in digital art happening right now
You've lost me here. Literally nothing about what you're describing requires NFTs other than convincing people to pay money for the NFTs by tangentially tying them to art. It is enabling artists to hack human psychology for money, not enabling brand new kinds of art.