The analogy breaks down at a copied painting being hard to distinguish but a copied piece of digital art is literally impossible to distinguish, right down to its hash.
People who collect Picasso’s want the piece the artists hands truly created, that’s why copies hold no real value. By copying digital art you _are_ getting the work the artists hands created, the identical hash can prove it.
The "original" digital work is identical in fidelity, form, and use to any reproduction. Your metaphor is wrong because in an NFT system, you don't get a photograph, you get a molecule for molecule identical replica of the original painting. In that case, yeah? Why buy art if you can get a copy that's literally an identical clone of the original?
If anyone could, at no meaningful cost, download a physically identical replica of a Jackson Pollock and have it, you can be sure the price of art would suffer quite a bit. Your ability to prove that you are the person who owns the work is meaningless if anyone can just also freely have the exact work itself.
> A copy of a painting can be a work of art, but it is different. It did not sit at the artists' atelier, it hasn't traveled through different places to finally hang at the buyer's living room.
Yes, and a copy of a digital work still has some value, but there's only one NFT that the artist issued to represent ownership of the digital work. These are precisely identical stories. Even if you could create a physical copy of a physical painting with arbitrarily high fidelity (perhaps at the atomic level), there would still only be one painting that sat in the artist's studio, and I suspect the art world would still only value that one as the original.
In other words, the fidelity with which one can create copies of an original work is irrelevant to the determination and valuation of originality.
I'm not completely sold on the Mona Lisa comparison. Making an exact copy is tough. Sure, you can take a picture, you can even make a painted version that's pretty close. But only one was actually hand-painted by Leonardo da Vinci.
But in the case of the digital art, you can have an exact copy. Indistinguishable from the original in all ways. Sure, the NFT says someone has to own the 'real' original, but what extra value does that have over a literal copy?
You can duplicate the artwork but you can not duplicate the ownership. If anything, you using a copy of the artwork increases the value of the ownership by signalling it is an appreciated piece.
Why would a digital drawing not be valuable when some paper drawing can be sold for millions like van Gogh's La Mousmé ?
But you're not paying for the tangibility. Digital image replication is near perfect. You could have a tangible copy of the Mona Lisa that is physically indistinguishable from the real one.
The reason people pay millions for artworks is because of the intangible provenance. If the value was the tangible, then tangible digital replications would sell for the same value as the original.
You’re sort of missing my point. An artist creating a similar work is not equivalent.
If they were atomically identical copies, they would be literally the same. Any idea of “difference” would be completely false. That’s the difference here, these (NFTs) are by all means atomic copies. They aren’t close to the same, they ARE the same.
If we could make atomic copies of the Mona Lisa it would surely drop in value… scarcity is what causes works like the Mona Lisa to be valuable. With an NFT there is no scarcity because unlimited duplicates, each as real as the original, can be produced for nearly free.
This seems like flawed logic. It's not the exact same thing. If a painter reproduces a Picasso, otherwise knows as art fraud, does it have the same value as the original? Why not? I'll leave it at that.
Society deems that an original work of art by, say, Pablo Picasso is more valuable than an indistinguishable copy by an unknown or lesser known artist.
Making a good copy of a Picasso is not that difficult. Go to any decent art school, and you will find artists who can competently forge a Picasso.
Many owners of Picasso artwork in fact display forgeries, which they call "replicas" in polite company, and keep the original works in secure storage, safe from any possible damage. Most people cannot distinguish between an original work and its forgery anyway.
In fact, even expert collectors are routinely fooled by forgeries![a] The authenticity of many works of art can be ascertained only by looking at provenance, documentary evidence, and historical context -- an imprecise process riddled with human bias and error.
Non-fungible tokens (NFTs) are like authentic works of art, except that their authenticity, contents, ownership, and provenance (including date of origin) are protected by strong cryptography, making forgeries impossible for all practical purposes.
And society deems that an NFT representing the authentic first tweet by Jack Dorsey -- with its contents, ownership, and provenance protected by cryptography -- is more valuable than an indistinguishable copy of the tweet made by an unknown or lesser known person.
an original picasso is a historic artifact with the same paint that the artist himself used and his brush marks etc.
a copy isn’t. an nft is just bytes. a copy is exactly the same as the original. it’s impossible to get an exact copy of a picasso because he himself only ever painted one. you can carbon date it etc
It's interesting to me how the art world seems to stand alone on their opinion about copies. Literature, music, software... in every other area we believe that if a copy can't be told from its master they must both have equal value. I can't imagine someone saying that they'd rather buy the hard drive someone saved their work on instead of a copy transmitted over the network.
Maybe art collectors are wrong about forgeries - if forgeries don't provide the same mental dividend that real paintings do, wouldn't you be able to tell the difference without an X-ray machine?
> But ultimately how is that different from the arbitrary rules we use to define which physical object is the "original" and why those arbitrary rules define value.
It's different because the artist actually put their brush on the original canvas, but not the copies. I could buy that the emphasis we put on the original having more value is arbitrary, but there's nothing actually arbitrary about selecting which painting is _the original_.
The problem I see with NFTs is that the arbitrariness is shifted from deciding which piece has value (original vs copy) to which one is _the original_ (copy A or copy B). They're both copies.
> If you own a JPG, do you own the artwork? According to the artist who is distributing the work as a token, and also according the social consensus of others who are collecting art in this way, the answer is no.
But according to the rest of the world the answer is 'Yes'
The rest of the world thinks that in order for something to be considered original that thing has to be hard to replicate
Replicating an NFT is as easy as doing a screenshot or Right clic > 'Save as' . And any random internet user stumbling upon that NFT can do it.
In order to replicate a painting such as the Mona Lisa you need millions of dollars of equipment and millions of dollars to pay experts who'd do so without ruining the sole original, and still won't be the same as the original.
Maybe subtle nuances not even discernible by the human eye, but still after millions of dollars of equipment, millions of man hours you don't have something which is 1:1 as the original Mona Lisa. With NFTs is again as easy as screenshots or Right clic > 'Save as'
> Of course yes it is - its less valuable after it is created because copying it costs nothing.
I think you can apply that same argument to something like a normal painting. Sure, the price for making copy isn’t zero, but it’s practically zero when comparing to the millions of dollars that the most expensive paintings are sold for. So why do people pay so much then? Because they want the original. That also applies for wanting to own the original version of a digital painting.
And the fact that a painting is not reproducible. The best you can get is close to the original, but it will still be different because its the real world. Copies of digital assets are exact replicas. Thus, the only real value is, as you say, provenance, but I think much fewer people care about that than we all seem to think.
I'm not necessarily an NFT proponent, but to be fair, you can also duplicate art in the real world. Forgeries and replicas of the Mona Lisa and other famous art exist, and are sometimes so good they fool museum curators for years. Yet, they're almost worthless compared to the original. Why?
What is the difference between a painting by Leonardo, and an exact copy by a very skilled forger and Artist?
“Nothing”. Except, that we can prove Leonardo painted it as we have the history of ownership. The fact the jpeg isn’t unique isn’t the problem. It’s who minted the NFT. If you know it’s the artist, then only that “copy” is the real one. It’s all bullshit I know but there is an approximation of the above question.
I don't think the physical object is really relevant. Imagine we all had robotic painters in our garages, which given $1 of materials, could precisely replicate any brushwork from some images.
Surely that wouldn't destroy the value of famous originals? Because their value is based on provenance, not the physical difficulty of (re)creation. NFTs are the same - replicating a JPEG is trivial, but the replica won't have the same provenance.
We can get very close, but even if we had technology to make an indistinguishable copy the original wouldn't fall in value and none of the copies would be near it.
The Mona Lisa isn't valuable because it's a nice painting: it's valuable because of its history and meaning to the arts.
>You could have a tangible copy of the Mona Lisa that is physically indistinguishable from the real one.
It certainly would not be. It might look very very similar, but in no way indistinguishable to the degree that one digital file is literally the same as a copy of itself.
People who collect Picasso’s want the piece the artists hands truly created, that’s why copies hold no real value. By copying digital art you _are_ getting the work the artists hands created, the identical hash can prove it.
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