Ask HN: Where Were the Technologists When Crypto Art Happened?

[0xG]

Thoughts:

- A crypto artist asks: where were the actual technologists, innovators, and those who should “get it” when digital art was happening?

- Where are the tech gigabrains and visionaries (devs, VCs, etc.), the ones who usually spot and bet on the future?

- Where are the modern patrons of digital art?

- The next master might not be painting ceilings and should their patron be a Silicon Valley VC firm in Palo Alto?

- Why do we still struggle to accept digital art? Is it attachment to the past? Traditional, conservative ideas of art-making and appreciation? Mainstream notions of what “art” is?

- Has art lost its role in modern society? Or do "artists" live in a bubble, foolish to think the mainstream would care, when art barely touches most people’s daily lives?

- Debunk the “right-click and save” argument: they are right the media is fungible, but what matters is the provable artist signature. Even in the traditional art world, that’s what gives value.

- It’s easy to generalize and call everything a scam but by doing so, are we ignoring actual avant-garde, medium-native art? Art built for a worldwide computer (Ethereum) running on a shared global state.

- Finally, what in the reader’s opinion needs to happen for this kind of contemporary art to become more accessible and approachable outside of the crypto bubble?

[nobankai]

> but what matters is the provable artist signature.

This actually means nothing in a medium where you can create infinite perfect copies of something. If we had 100,000 identical replicas of Starry Night then there would be no value in a signed original. This is how digital art fundamentally works, your "ownership" persists insofar as people respect the authority of your notary.

[0xG]

The notary can be a public, decentralized and distributed ledger like a Blockchain. The signature and signed copy then can be "scarce" like are signed posters right?

[nobankai]

I cannot name a single moment in the history of my life where another person has asked me who "owns" a piece of digital art. I know people who asked about the author, but nobody cares about the owner.

Unless your ownership confers some sort of meaningful control over the piece, society will entirely ignore your rules and distribute the work however they want. It's not like you can take the case to court, anyways. You're role-playing on a extralegal asset, not a tallying stocks and bonds.

[0xG]

So even though in the case of Blockchain the owner has control over the piece (signature), do you think that the disconnect between "signature" and the fungible digital work is too big or meta and we should rather reconsider how we think of art, scarcity and those old dynamics? In this case will the artist signature and chain of provenance and creator<>collector connection be useless?

[nobankai]

Let's put it this way. You're a wealthy patron that sponsors an animated feature-length film you intend to put on the blockchain. You pay the animators, the film is made, and now the hash is on the blockchain.

Strictly speaking, your "ownership" is only of the hash. Unless you register the film as a copyright, the US won't recognize your ownership of the film. You cannot stop people from sharing or deriving the work without legal protection, the utility the blockchain provides in this instance is entirely cosmetic. NFTs aren't just unnecessary - they're useless without external guarantees. The "chain of provenance" for the cloud is a scam. All digital works can be copied infinitely for $0/copy, and the ultimate irony is that the only way to stop that outcome is from abandoning the blockchain and relying on a government to protect you.

You want to know where all the talented, educated and principled technologists were during the NFT boom? Far, far away from any form of blockchain.