Your explanation only makes sense if you base the value of the art on the experience of viewing it, or the intrinsic value.
People like owning objects that have a history or story about them, like a ring worn by their great great grandmother, a medal earned by their grandfather for fighting in a war, or something their child made for them. These things have little to no intrinsic value, yet people can regard them as priceless because of the history surrounding the object.
The same can be true of paintings and other works of art. It's one thing to hang a thing on your wall that a world-famous master created and an entirely different thing for a copy made by a low-wage worker in Asia. Physically they could be identical but the history is different.
To get to NFTs specifically, I don't think an NFT as currently implemented captures this concept.
I think the majority of the value in art nfts will be derived from being part of the provenance, or being part of the history of the beginning of 'owning' digital art, much like owning a famous painting. By extension it could be applied to digital culture, for example the tiktok guy riding his skateboard is selling that meme as an nft. So if collectors are good (and lucky), they are basically able to buy their way into a niche of history by being associated with works that represent periods of cultural significance.
Sure that may seem stupid to most people, but most people don't even get why regular art is significant or can be very expensive. Personally I would attribute it to my lack of understanding rather than dismiss it outright.
Art has a couple of sticky points that allows it to be used as storage of value:
* It is impossible to copy and produce second original
* It is recognizable by trained and common people alike, it is useful a symbol of status
* New art inherits some of artist's prestige; say a newly discovered Picasso painting will be recognized as valuable just because it's a Picasso
* It is very difficult to produce enmasse - a computer-generated drawing in the style of Picasso will not be valued as an original Picasso
* Wealthy people agree it's a storage of value - when somebody needs liquidity they can be assured that somebody will buy their unique piece.
Do NFTs touch all of these points? 1, yes. 2. they're trying to build the fame of NFTs now. 3. they're trying to build it now, very unlikely it will succeed. 4. Are some NFTs esthetically pleasing ? I would guess this is why it's needed to be tied to an artwork. 5. Unlikely.
> The reason, I claim, is that the significant thing we humans value when we value art is the expression of an original act of creation, comprised by individual acts of conception, production, and realization accomplished by some ingenious mind.
I completely agree with this, and I think the experiment with NFTs is that perhaps a significant portion of humans will come to consider an NFT issued by an artist as an expression of the the original act of creation of a work, particularly for works that are not inherently instantiated in a unique physical object the way a painting is. It really is that simple: just like monetary valuations of famous paintings, there's no "inherent" correct answer to whether a particular NFT "counts" as a unique representation of the original act of creation of a work. It's just up to people. Remember, even copies of physical works (like lithographs) can command high valuations based on their perceived originality, despite everyone agreeing that they are copies.
I won't attempt to make a "realist" argument for the value of art, but I'll point something important out: as the owner of a "valuable" piece of physical art, you own a product of original physical labor. When you look at the pigments on the canvas, you're looking at the product of an artist physically transferring materials onto the medium. That itself is a rarity: people who (for whatever reason) value that artist's work realize that the artist can only perform that exact labor once.
It's difficult to say the same for NFTs: it's not clear where the original is, or why it should be emotionally/aesthetically rewarding to look at its digital attestation. I didn't frame the certificate of authenticity that came with the rug in my living room, after all.
> The value of an asset gives incentive to collectors, but it’s not the point. It’s supporting the artist who created it to enable them to make more and sustain a career.
Nothing about NFTs makes this easier. NFTs don't make it easier to donate money to an artist, their only innovation on top of the existing system is that they create an asset that might increase in value for the owner. That's it. NFTs provide nothing other than incentive to collectors, that is exactly the point, there's nothing else of substance to them that could be the point.
> Can you do that by looking at a reproduction of the original JPEG?
I hear this argument a lot, and I sometimes wonder whether or not peopele really understand that NFTs are NOT the original JPEG. NFTs have no relation to the original JPEG, they're something that gets created after the fact.
Buying an NFT is not the same as buying an original painting, when you buy an NFT, you are buying a token -- not the original token, not a token that is intrinsically linked to the creation of a piece of artwork -- a token that is created after the fact that has no fundamental link to "original" or "unique" qualities of the artwork itself.
In fact, when you look at an NFT, you are necessarily always looking at a reproduction of the original JPEG, because that's how the Internet works. What gets transmitted to your computer from the hashed link or reference in the NFT is a reproduction of a reproduction. 100% of the time.
So the comparisons to buying a physical piece of artwork are absurd; this is nothing like going to a museum and looking at an original piece of work. There is no lighting or quality difference between an NFT and a normal JPEG like you would see at a museum. There also is no spiritual or emotional difference, because you can't look at an NFT and say something like "these were the bytes that were made."
In terms of the artwork itself, buying an NFT is the same as buying a reproduction of the Mona Lisa at a gift shop. The token itself has no connection to the original artwork beyond a link/hash and the identity of the person who minted it. And if that's enough of a connection for you, fine. But what you're buying is a poster reproduction with a certificate from the copyright holder. There is no spiritual or physical connection to the "original" JPEG happening here.
The full quote is below:
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> The argument is easily dismissed when you understand why owning art is essential. It’s not holding it that matters. The value of an asset gives incentive to collectors, but it’s not the point. It’s supporting the artist who created it to enable them to make more and sustain a career. Because without that, we simply don’t have art.
It feels like a symptom of our current scarcity-obsessed society that the author so sincerely and immediately connects "supporting the artist" with "owning art". There's no attempt to explain why support can only be expressed through owning a scarce asset, and I think the author doesn't take the time to explain that because it may have genuinely never occurred to them that there are ways to interact with an artistic ecosystem that aren't based around property, ownership, and exclusivity.
Often when I talk to people about NFTs, I find that this bias in their philosophy about how art works and about the essential nature of ownership over the world blocks their ability to evaluate what the technology really is and what is actually happening when they buy an NFT.
NFTs are really only an innovation if you have a worldview that states that the only way to appreciate and foster beauty is to own it and to exclude it from the world around you. The people who have that worldview could always have been commissioning and donating to artists. Doing so would have given them a much more direct, moral and/or spiritual link to the creative process of the artist.
But also in a strange way they couldn't do that, because that concept is foreign to them. In their mind, an artistic piece that can't be owned, traded, bought, and sold almost doesn't exist. They look at the increased availability of the Internet and view that increased access as inherently cheapening art, and so they look at NFTs as a kind of savior technology that pushes artwork back into the realm of something that can be coveted and speculated on, which to them is more fundamentally "real". They are incapable of separating beauty from exclusivity.
Of course, NFTs are also a poor system even for their intended goal of increasing scarcity: the technology is flimsy and disconnected from reality, and it's too easy for artists to flood the market (sometimes not even with their own artwork). But even with its flaws, there are certain people with this mindset who still flock to NFTs because to them it promises to make art "real" again, and to move artwork back into a realm that they understand and can interact with in the only way that they know.
While I agree with what you've written, this sentence, "This is not so unlike how NFTs work", is the critical point that remains to be seen. My opinion is that it's unlike NFTs enough in the average human mind that the analogy falls over.
Yes, pretty much all of the value in expensive works of art is in the provenance of the artwork, not the actual image. But the fact that that provenance is embodied in a non-copyable physical piece of art, versus a ledger in the literal ether that is just a piece of text that says "Yep, this person bought it", is a critical difference that I think is unbridgeable.
To me—and I'm not at all a high art person, so take this with a pinch of salt—I think the value in owning an original painting would be knowing that it is the original, crafted first hand by the artist, rather than the notion that it is mine and not someone else's (which to me continues to be a worthless concept in isolation). If The Lourve said I could keep the Mona Lisa above my mantelpiece forever more, I would not be looking to place bids on it.
For digital art that obviously doesn't apply as the concept of "the original" artefact is borderline meaningless, however that leads neatly onto the other thing I dislike about NFTs, which is the introduction of artificial scarcity in a medium not burdened by it.
It's almost like you're saying that an NFT doesn't actually capture the thing it's correlated with. But if that was true it would completely undermine the concept of an NFT of an art work. The NFT wouldn't have any more unique value than an item # in a catalog.
Why do so many here seem to be so proud of their lack of understanding of the value of NFTs?
If you have an NFT, you get to do things others cannot. That's the value right there. At the very least, holding an NFT gives you the ability to transfer it to someone else and make them the holder. Anyone can confirm that you did in fact transfer it and made the other person the holder.
In addition, you potentially get access to other benefits, such as acceptance of some alternate meaning in the NFT social circle as well as potential benefits in software written that respects the NFT.
What seems to have taken off most is that the NFT social circle will accept ownership of some linked item within the NFTs data. They see the NFT record as a register of provenance that they're willing to recognize.
Do NFTs signal legal ownership? I imagine we're going to find out that it probably depends. But even where they don't, they certainly signify something akin to ownership or possession. And that ownership of scarce goods is precisely something that is valued by certain communities, especially the art trade community.
That you can mint your own NFT with the same data, or that a link in an NFT stops working don't really change the nature of the kind of ownership. What NFTs offer sort of mimics the 'realness' of a piece of art. I can make a picture of the Mona Lisa too, but no one will respect that picture as the real Mona Lisa. While you might lose out on the pretty physical object, you gain in cryptographic provability and potential software integration
I feel like you're trying to find a more concrete reason than is necessary - the fact that it is unique can be valuable on its own. I can go buy a reproduction Picasso that looks identical to the original and from an art standpoint it's effective equivalent, but it's still worth nothing compared to a "real" one. The fact that the original was painted by Picasso is what provides it so much value, even though who painted a particular piece of art is not a physical part of the art itself. A unique NFT effectively provides value in the same way, it is valuable as long as people care about who/what issued it and thus want to be able to say they own that unique one.
And while it's notable that digital art can be duplicated perfectly and physical art cannot, I don't personally think that matters all that much. People who are buying a Picasso aren't doing so just for the art, they're doing it so they can say they own a Picasso. In the same way you're not buying an NFT for the art itself, you're buying it because it's uniquely identifiable in a way you and others care about.
We can't all be Rockefeller or Carnagies! I get your point - most NFT does not have great prestige and is probably more a question of speculation. My example was more to explain why formal ownership of a piece of art could be valuable even if it didn't mean ownership of any physical object or even ownership of the copyright. For people paying hundreds of millions for a van Gogh, the purpose is probably not the physical access to the thing (I assume it is just in some safe vault anyway, when not on loan to a museum) and it is not because they expect great returns on selling reproductions either. It is just the prestige of ownership and probably the hope that the piece sell for even more in the future.
That's a good explanation and it looks like people do value NFTs for those reasons. But it still doesn't compare to the Mona Lisa which if I possessed it I would know that only those physical brush strokes came from Leonardo's hand. The vinyl example is better. But even then the vinyl is physically old and unique. I can take it out and know that it was pressed in 1972. The NFT is just pixels on my screen that are a copy of a copy of.. and will be destroyed when I close the viewer.
This is hilariously ludicrous. NFT artwork is valuable for the same reasons that physical artwork is valuable. And that is that there is a consensus that something is the "original" and that that "original" piece of art has some value to people who into art.
Consider this thought experiment. I make a drawing. It's famous. Everyone wants it. It sells at auction for $5 million. I next invent a machine that makes identical copies in identical style. Absolutely indistinguishable from the original. However, the original has a certificate of authenticity that it is indeed the original.
Has the original gone up in value, or down in value?
There is nothing stopping me, or anyone else, from making a copy of an NFT. It's trivially easy, and free. The copies are worth nothing without the COA, which is what the blockchain attempts to provide. I find the whole thing hilariously stupid, but I find that to be true of art collection in general. To each their own on what things you want to collect.
But with a book who gives a shit whether it's the original book or a copy of the original book? No one. No one is going to pay extra to have an authentic copy of a textbook. No one will care.
The link is a red herring. Just like an original Picasso, the content of the thing you own is responsible for very little of its value (an excellent forgery would deliver all the aesthetic value of the original, but it would be much less valuable). The provenance of the thing is the reason it is valued. There’s really nothing new or unique about NFTs other than the technology used to implement them.
This is 100% correct. For those that can’t understand the value of NFTs, it’s the same reason a “squares and circles” modern art piece can be worth millions - it’s the story of who made it, the collective belief, the rarity... Ultimately it has value because people agree it has value. It’s the same reason the Tom Brady football rookie card sold for millions despite it being nothing more than ink on flimsy cardboard. The actual item itself is secondary to the story it tells.
>Sometimes no matter how hard you look there is no underlying value beneath the price action, there is no reason or rhyme as to why people become maniac about stuff, and feel like they MUST have it.
...like people paying millions for a painting rather than getting a replica made for $100k (or whatever)? My point isn't that NFTs have underlying value (whatever that means), just that they're valuable in approximately the same way that original paintings have value over replicas. I'll quote an earlier comment here:
>But you still paid a few million more for the original painting, even though it's virtually indistinguishable from a replica. It's more helpful to think of an original painting as a bundle of two things:
>Original painting = thing that looks like a painting + bragging rights
>An NFT is just the "bragging rights" part of the original painting, and the JPG that anyone can access is the "thing that looks like a painting ".
I disagree with your analogy that "Digital ownership is like putting your name on a building, like a museum." The main value of putting your name on a building or museum is the branding value, and that's not the driving force behind the value of an NFT.
The analogy that DID make me understand NFTs is the traditional art market. When a painting sells for millions of dollars, basically all of that value comes from the provenance of the artwork, not the artwork itself. That is, with present technology it is possible to make an extremely detailed replica of, say, "The Portrait of Adele Bloch Bauer I", one that was indistinguishable to the human eye from a distance of a meter or so, that would sell for a few grand max, not the $135 million of the original.
Thus, if humans are capable of assigning a huge amount of value to provenance, why can't this be applied to digital artwork as well? IMO, though, since digital copies are exactly identical to the original (unlike physical objects), it remains to be seen whether humans will value this concept of provenance the same as they do in the physical world.
I still don't get it. Sure art work is artificially priced. But if I buy a Picasso original, I can hang it on the wall, show it to my friends, look at it closely, burn it, even. Yes, "bragging rights" might be part of it, but I own something physical and (probably) scarce or unique. What do I actually get when I buy an NFT?
People like owning objects that have a history or story about them, like a ring worn by their great great grandmother, a medal earned by their grandfather for fighting in a war, or something their child made for them. These things have little to no intrinsic value, yet people can regard them as priceless because of the history surrounding the object.
The same can be true of paintings and other works of art. It's one thing to hang a thing on your wall that a world-famous master created and an entirely different thing for a copy made by a low-wage worker in Asia. Physically they could be identical but the history is different.
To get to NFTs specifically, I don't think an NFT as currently implemented captures this concept.
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