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.
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?
If digital art is as valuable and worthy of recognition as physical art, then look at it through lens of the difference in price between the original Mona Lisa and replicas of it.
Modern art reproducers can make copies of the Mona Lisa that experts can't easily distinguish from the original. This kind of replica fraud happens often in the art world. I find it interesting to try to justify the value of the original when it is almost zero cost to have an exact replica of the original. The scarcity is not real, or at least the scarcity of being able to enjoy the intrinsic value of looking at the painting is not real. When you remove that part, the value lies only in being able to verify the authenticity of the work, rather than in its quality as art.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
No, or at least not entirely. Even if I was to (theoretically) copy the Mona Lisa so perfectly that no existing technology could tell the difference, the original would still be worth more than my copy.
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.
Well there's also the allure of the physical object that the artist created by hand. People done go see the Mona Lisa rather than a replica for bragging rights. That's not there with digital goods.
Of course, but a work of digital art, which is what we are talking about, is not scarce. There are infinitely many exact copies of it and each copy costs nothing to produce. Anyone pretending that one of the copies is more authentic than the others are kidding themselves.
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.
> 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'
The real mona lisa has massive real-world value. You can get a copy of the mona lisa that the average person can't distinguish between for $10.99, and yet that copy in no way reduces the value of the real mona lisa (if anything it increases it).
Things that are intentionally non-fungible don't care much about being copied, as long as you can always identify a copy, at the end of the day it's mostly a status game. But status games do have real-world value.
I think this hits the nail on the head. My response to seeing "the" Mona Lisa is much different than seeing a reproduction of the same, no matter how faithful that reproduction may be. In a digital space where anything and everything can be losslessly duplicated ad infinitum that distinction simply doesn't exist.
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.
reply