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ZorbaTHut  1yr ago (text post)   44992 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 5, 2022

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What is legitimately wrong with NFTs?

In traditional art, you get a painter to make a painting, there's an element of scarcity and expense involved. With NFTs, somebody spends some Ethereum to mint a bunch of them, then they're done. There's an element of scarcity and expense involved.

Then people buy, sell and revalue them as they see fit. Now I don't want to buy a Bored Ape. But I also wouldn't pay a vaguely similar amount for this: https://www.saatchiart.com/art/Painting-Nature-36/555517/8571133/view

I could surely find an example of some extraordinarily ugly piece of modern art purchased for some vast sum - how is that any more desirable than an NFT? Why is it more desirable to own a physical picture than a digital picture? If it's just the tax loophole for donating to art museums, how is that a valid justification for the fine art market over NFTs as opposed to some sneaky loophole manipulation?

The first problem is that the art is uniformly meritless and awful. The second is that the NFT has nothing to do with ownership or viewing, and is just a way to trick people into doing the much more useful activity of donating to the author's patreon (or even bitcoin wallet if you want). And third, the way the internet works makes just publishing art for free much better for the consumer, and there's art much better than almost any NFT project available on twitter, for free!

Have you checked all the art before saying its uniformly awful?

I rather liked this one: https://opensea.io/assets/matic/0x2953399124f0cbb46d2cbacd8a89cf0599974963/48388610335180253795576366386312396261162674450341463428664179782889647374436

It captures the mocking grin of our effeminate, malign overlords. There's political commentary. There's a pun in the title. The creator gets 10% of each transaction. We consumers can view the image whenever we want. What's not to like?

No it doesn't, it's the awful bored ape style copied into jeffrey epstein. There's no characterization, no angles or lighting, no detail, etc. It's just a very bad pun.

Modern art fans somehow never need to barge in and ask this question. I can link The Line Goes Up for you, but I assume you've already seen it. My personal gripe with NFTs, besides the tiresome advocacy, the wasteful Blockchain, and the predatory crypto-anarcho-capitalism is the attitude that everything needs to be a digital asset, that we should commodify every damn thing.

I'm not going to watch a 2 hour movie. What about NFTs means that everything should be 'commodified'? The other half of the anti-NFT argument seems to be that they're rubbish at commodifying things, that you can just right-click save and this is a stunning blow to the whole concept. It can't be both ways.

NFTs are just a way for rich people to show that they're rich and have clout, like buying art or ridiculously expensive fashion. It's a bit obnoxious but not an actual, realized way of manipulating the tax system as with existing art.

I'm not going to watch a 2 hour movie

Video is a poor medium, someone made a transcript.

NFTs are just a way for rich people to show that they're rich and have clout

They are that thing, but they're also a way to fleece people with pump and dump schemes.

rubbish at commodifying things

NFT jpegs are rubbish at commodifying things, but you could actually tie the ownership to something interesting. It would be massively annoying if that was done. for example check out what Pearson wants to do.

The move to digital helps diminish the secondary market, and technology like blockchain and NFTs allows us to participate in every sale of that particular item as it goes through its life

I think part of the issue is that digital things are inherently anti-scarce. Information wants to be free, etc. We should support digital artists as much as traditional physical artists, but artificial scarcity just doesn't seem like the way to do it. Either it's available (with some paywall, if necessary) to all forever, or it's going to be yoinked out of the artist's hands whether they like it or not. We can barely put a lid on porn piracy, and every NFT that has ever been flaunted has been vulnerable to "right-click > Save as."

I'm sick of NFTs but if you think "ha ha right-click save-as" is a useful critique you have not engaged with the argument.

I can go into google images and 'save as' the Mona Lisa - yet this isn't a devastating blow to fine art. The Louvre isn't going to shut down because of me. Nobody can stop you right clicking anything, NFT or not. The whole point is that it's clear who owns the product, not that it's somehow kept obscured from mortal eyes so only the owner can see it.

For some reason people like first editions of important books and will pay more for them. Nobody considers this a grave injustice, nobody clowns on these people by saying "I bought the same book for cheaper". People just popularized this bizarre notion of 'right click save as = you're an idiot' when there's no logical connection to how this is good or bad. For several months the right-click NFT meme was plaguing twitter and the internet and nobody seemed to justify how this is a coherent concept.

At the same time, I think there's still a qualitative difference. You're comparing physical things to digital: sure, I can download an image of the Mona Lisa, but there's no confusion as to who owns what. With books (and especially comic books!), there's also a meaningful difference with special editions or rare versions. NFT art doesn't entirely have this; at best, people are really buying the receipt/deed of ownership, which could count for something, but the technology remains speculative even now, and it's hard to see what difference owning an NFT actually makes beyond being useful for entry into clubs and the like.

I think NFTs could potentially make a comeback, but they need to have a serious use case, and shed the baggage on top of that.

I can go into google images and 'save as' the Mona Lisa - yet this isn't a devastating blow to fine art

It was, actually? A hundred thousand hours are spent looking at cute anime girl faces for every hour spent staring at something in the Louvre. Traditional physical art is much less important than it was pre-industrial revolution.

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