[mpeg]

The way I look at it is that I can buy a print of a van Gogh for $10 but the real painting costs millions. The key difference there is that the real painting is real and the art house will some sort of provenance record that lists all previous owners all the way to the artist.

In the same way, when you buy an NFT you're buying the provenance without buying the actual art. The art is understood to be easy to reproduce, you can download it and print it yourself if you want to hang it up on a wall.

[akerl_]

When you buy an actual piece of art, the provenance is useful because it lets you know the art you have is the real thing.

What does provenance even matter if you don’t actually own the art? If you want to support the artist and you don’t want / can’t afford the actual piece, just donate to them and you’d have the same effect.

[miracle2k]

> When you buy an actual piece of art, the provenance is useful because it lets you know the art you have is the real thing.

When you buy art as an NFT, you do own an actual piece of art. Unless you think a non-physical art like say The Clock inherently cannot be sold outside of a copyright transfer, and that has been untrue long before NFTs.

[mpeg]

In the case of an NFT, I can prove that I own it, and I can prove the provenance of it all in one go.

Sure, the artist could do something dishonest like sell the same piece twice, but I'm assuming good faith from the artist, or at least from the ones I buy from.