The NFT is sold under the false pretence that is somehow connected with some object of art, when in fact there isn't any such connection. This is what makes NFTs a scam.
"Legitimacy is a pattern of higher-order acceptance. An outcome in some social context is legitimate if the people in that social context broadly accept and play their part in enacting that outcome, and each individual person does so because they expect everyone else to do the same."
The token is conceptually tied to the artwork. This is especially true with digital & software-driven work embedded within the blockchain, such as Deafbeef's tokens[1].
These issues are not new to crypto. Plenty of art is only 'conceptually' tied to their distributed editions. For example: an artist or photographer may own a digital master or photographic negative, and from that they may decide to produce and distribute 50 printed and signed editions. The distributed work is valued not because of the material (a piece of paper) or its contents (a rendered image), because it was distributed and signed by the artist's hand. Anybody could photocopy that print to produce the same rendered contents, or even print their own copy if they have access to a high resolution file and inkjet printer, but the copy would be worth no value, because it did not come from the artist's hand.
> The distributed work is valued not because of the material (a piece of paper) or its contents (a rendered image), because it was distributed and signed by the artist's hand. Anybody could photocopy that print to produce the same rendered contents, or even print their own copy if they have access to a high resolution file and inkjet printer, but the copy would be worth no value, because it did not come from the artist's hand.
But that would require a distribution of NFT in excess of 1.
People are not minting 50 or 500 NFTs which are all the same as in your example.
People are minting 1 NFT and selling it . At that point one person (the buyer) has the original and the rest of people on the internet just screenshots it to have a 1:1 identical piece of art, which are all just the same as the original.
Plus your example also forgets one important element: the scarcity of the time and the social relationships of the artist. The 50 printed and signed editions are considered worthy because the artist had to subtract time from whatever other activity they had planned in order to sign the copies.
Once you make the process of "signing NFTs" automatized (like for example making a transaction on the blockchain via smart contract) the whole magic and scarcity of it disappears.
Maybe you could secure the scarcity by making it expensive for the artist to mint the NFT, but then they'd be the ones protesting and not adopting the tech.
Some NFTs are distributed as 1/1 (like a single-edition print of a photographic negative), while others are distributed as an edition of 50 or 1000. In the case of platforms like ArtBlocks[1], each edition is itself unique and tied to the transaction hash, hence their tagline "1 of 1 of X."
The buyer holds the token (cryptographically secured to their wallet). Any person can save the JPG that is conceptually tied to the token, but that does not give them ownership over the artistic token (i.e. they cannot transfer it to another wallet).
Part of the challenge here is that it gets to the question of "art ownership" in a digital domain. 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.
It does take time and fees to deploy to the blockchain, in the same way that it takes time and fees to produce a series of print artworks. My own project (Subscapes[2]) required a significant investment, to upload 17kb of generative art code onto the blockchain.
> 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'
> But according to the rest of the world the answer is 'Yes'
It depends who you ask, and when you ask it. The understanding of 'digital ownership' may be shifting, as we can see in real-time with the OP thread, where Visa is making a claim that their ownership over the digital token is distinctly different than their ownership over the digital JPG file (and, apparently, distinct enough that they felt it worth paying a large sum to acquire).
Indeed, anybody can reproduce a JPG by right clicking and saving the image, and there are many valuable artworks in art history that can be reproduced with seemingly little effort — such as all white canvases (Malevich), splashes of paint (Pollock), and handwritten instructions on scrap paper (LeWitt).
And I do not think anybody previous to NFTs would make a claim that they "own" an artist's work because they captured it via "Right Click > Save As."
Another way to view this is: ownership of digital art is not a notion that had much social consensus around it before the advent of NFTs.
> ownership of digital art is not a notion that had much social consensus around it before the advent of NFTs.
I don't mean to disrespect artists but when all is said and done the only question that matters is:
"Will a museum pay me, the owner of the piece of art to have it in their collection, so I can generate passive income from it?"
In the case of real pieces of art the answer is positive.
If this critical component is missing then you are left with a market where you can only sell for profit to an individual bigger fool.
2-D NFTs won't ever pass this test, 3-D NFTs are also in bad shape because museums are a social activity, something the regular person does to shield themselves from the summer heat while at the park with their SO.
Nobody dreams of logging into a 3-D museum , alone in their living while wearing an Oculus.
Art is a real world, social activity. The process of distributing art is a real world, social activity. Blockchain won't change this.
It sounds like you have decided what you think the future will look like based on your own narrow experience of technology, and are not open to alternative viewpoints.
And to answer your question: museums and institutions have been collecting 2D and 3D digital art, VR, code based art, etc for years. The NFT space provides new technologies that can be used here, and an alternative distribution channel & market for this type of work.
> People are not minting 50 or 500 NFTs which are all the same as in your example.
Of course they are. Same as with prints: singular pieces, editions of X, editions of "only available for 48 hours, everyone who buys in that time gets one", ... all are options artists use.
How do these 'conceptual ties' work? For example, suppose I create an NFT of the Eiffel Tower. When and how does that particular NFT become conceptually tied to the Eiffel Tower exactly? I don't understand.
It comes through a combination of the artist's intent ("I am distributing this artwork in the form of a limited series of tokens") and social consensus ("We recognize that the artefact is an artwork, created by the artist").
What you are asking is similar to Found Art. A signed toilet is not "Art" until social consensus decides that it is. An blockchain-signed Eiffel Tower is also not art, unless society says it to be so. Perhaps that will happen at some point in the future (an artist's digital reinterpretation of Found Art) but at present the crypto artworks we are mostly regarding tend to have a more direct relationship with what the artist/creator is producing by hand (or via digital code/software).
It is not much different than a print series, where the artist says the prints signed in pencil are "the artwork", and social consensus decides that only those pieces of paper with the artist's own pencil signature are valuable, instead of a reproduction by a machine or by a forger, even though the reproduction may have the same or similar material qualities.
Thanks for taking the time. My question was about the supposed connection between the NFT and the object of art. You're arguing about what constitutes art, but that wasn't the question. In fact, the object doesn't have to be artistic at all, it can be anything. At any rate, I'm not disputing that the object is "art". I'm questioning that there's a connection between the NFT and the object.
The connection at a technical level depends on the art project and token. For example ArtBlocks tokens are tied to a unique pseudorandom hash that is generated at the time of purchase, and that hash is used as input to the JavaScript software that is embedded within the smart contract in order to produce a matching visual. Autoglyphs does something like that directly in a smart contract without JS. Many 1/1 NFTs act more like hyperlinks to an IPFS hash with the media file for reference. Other art projects on the blockchain may use tokens and smart contracts in different ways.
At a conceptual level, I think the connection is more to do with “this NFT was minted by the artist’s hand (wallet), the same hand that created the artwork it points to.”
So the alleged connection is a hyperlink (or something to the same effect). And in the case of a physical object, it could be GPS coordinates. Right... therefore the only tie between the NFT and the object it's allegedly tied to is that the NFT contains directions to find the object... but these directions can also be found elsewhere for free. I think it's clear that the only way NFTs can be sold for money is by misrepresenting what NFTs are. Selling NFTs under the pretence that they're more than just directions is dishonest at the very least, if not downright fraud.
A token could be boiled down to a secured record in a distributed ledger ("X wallet owns Y token"). Most artists & collectors in the space understand this; but the mainstream media often mischaracterizes it as "buying JPGs."
Nobody who purchases a CryptoPunk today would expect to receive a JPG or media file of a pixelated avatar in return for their purchase. Rather, they would expect to receive ownership over the token (i.e. record in a distributed ledger). In the case of CryptoPunks, there is not even any "hyperlink" in the NFT – it is just an integer from 0 to 9999, stored within the state of the CryptoPunks contract.[1]
Do they hold ownership over the media file, or pixel artwork? No. Do they hold ownership over a digital token that (according to the project's creator, and according to social consensus) represents part of the CryptoPunks art project? Yes.
> Do they hold ownership over a digital token that (according to the project's creator, and according to social consensus) represents part of the CryptoPunks art project? Yes.
The social consensus says what? Obviously the NFT promoters want the public to believe that the NFT is part of an art collection, and this is why they use this ambiguous language that is intended to create the false impression that the NFT and the piece of art are the same thing or at least are closely connected with one another, and indeed the uneducated public will tend to believe that, but this a belief that is founded upon a lie. Anyone who actually knows what an NFT is is very unlikely to agree that these NFTs are part of an art project or have an artistic intent.
I'm not sure how my language is ambiguous. It's very clear to those participating that buying an NFT does not give you ownership over the intellectual property of the artwork, or even ownership over the image itself, hence the many "Right click Save As" memes[1].
> Anyone who actually knows what an NFT is is very unlikely to agree that these NFTs are part of an art project or have an artistic intent.
This is pretty presumptuous, and also wrong. One such counter-example is ZKM, which began acquiring NFTs in 2018.[2]
It's an ambiguous language, for example, when you say that the NFT "represents part of the CryptoPunks art project". Is it true? Well, maybe. A bread crumb can represent the starship Enterprise, but it would be absurd to describe it in this way. Or when ZKM describes NFTs as "digitally certified images" and also as "digital works" that are "transformed into unique pieces" (from your own link). In this is case, not so much ambiguous, but directly deceiving.
Yeah, when I realized you don't actually "own" it through any licenses it made me sour on the whole idea.
Is there a reason why people couldn't be granted a license to do whatever they wanted with an NFT? Seems kind of arbitrary to do so, but I'm sure there's a reason why it's like that.
Because anyone can mint an NFT, whether they have a license or not, so it would require a bureaucracy to check the validity of the NFTs, and so on, in other words a central authority. And if the system relies on a central authority then it makes no sense to trade the licenses on a blockchain, as the blockchain only adds an unnecessary step. Skip the blockchain and go directly to the central authority.
Buying a physical painting doesn’t give you any licenses to the artwork itself either. Just because you buy a modern painting at auction for $30 million doesn’t give you rights to start printing T-shirts of the art.
That is incorrect. You own the physical piece of art, not the copyright to the art. if I own an original sketch by Charles Shultz of Charlie Brown, that doesn’t give me any rights to the character of Charlie Brown. If an author gives me a handwritten, first draft manuscript of a new novel, I may be able to sell that physical manuscript but it doesn’t give me any rights to the work itself.
