[woodruffw]

I won't attempt to make a "realist" argument for the value of art, but I'll point something important out: as the owner of a "valuable" piece of physical art, you own a product of original physical labor. When you look at the pigments on the canvas, you're looking at the product of an artist physically transferring materials onto the medium. That itself is a rarity: people who (for whatever reason) value that artist's work realize that the artist can only perform that exact labor once.

It's difficult to say the same for NFTs: it's not clear where the original is, or why it should be emotionally/aesthetically rewarding to look at its digital attestation. I didn't frame the certificate of authenticity that came with the rug in my living room, after all.

[Normille]

Not only that. But many of the most popular NFTs are obviously batch created programmatically. It's not unusual to see collections containing many hundreds of variations on whatever piss-poor artwork they contain. So, even going back to the 'original' [however you establish what that is], chances are, it wasn't even created by an individual in any meaningful way. But, rather, spewed out by some automated permutation producing code.

[andrenth]

I don’t necessarily disagree but what does that say about digital photography?

[gerikson]

The issue of "originality" raised its head as soon as photography evolved beyond the daguerreotype (which could not be reproduced). As soon as you had a negative from which a print could be produced, you can theoretically produce infinite indistinguishable prints.

Photographs exist as art basically because the photographer or their agent promise to only produce a limited number of prints from an original.

[SAI_Peregrinus]

It's older than that, even woodcuts other printmaking processes have the same issue.

[woodruffw]

Hard to say!

I do some hobby film and digital photography, and it's been my experience that people love getting prints of the photos I've taken of them on film. Digital photos can also be printed, of course, but there's something (not clear what) special about knowing that a physical process other than an inkjet printer produced the image.