If you're talking about mass-produced watches sure. But visit, say, Rexhep Rexhepi's or the Gronefeld brothers' workshops, and you would be hard pressed to come away without an appreciation for hand-finished mechanical movements that border on art.
Yes, but if you buy the watch you can put it on your hand, use it and show it to me. NFT is more akin to a photo of an invoice from the workshop you attended - it might have some sentimental value to you, but it's not a watch, does not have intrinsic value and I don't have to respect it.
You're taking a digital item and complaining it doesn't exist irl. It's only an "invoice" to the physical world, it can actually be used for things in the digital world, like gaining access to private chat rooms / spaces or getting early access to product drops.
Also a digital item should have a value irl otherwise it won't get any respect irl. What you describe here is similar to any old-style password or subscription code, while a NFT art doesn't give you access to anything extra.
And which side of that continuum between craftmanship and lazy brand-markup are NFTs actually on? I don't look at the NFT artwork I'm seeing sold online and find myself filled with an appreciation for incredible, intricate, hand-finished work. Digital apes in particular are incredibly derivative and feel very mass-produced, this is the kind of artwork that would sell for maybe $50-100 tops as a commission. Except honestly not even for that much money, because part of the commission price is being able to choose what gets made, you can't just recolor the same image and give it a little cigarette and an earring.
It's all well and good to talk about designer watches that are perfectly constructed masterpieces, but NFTs aint that. They're the $3 mass-produced digital watches that are getting a brand slapped on them and then sold purely for the name. The only thing more mass-produced than the bored ape collection are the silly pixel avatars on Twitter; we're not really talking about significant skill or craftmanship or even creative expression here. Zoom in on some of the images in the bored app collection, the artist is very literally copying and pasting parts of the drawing between pictures, that's why they all look the same.
It just feels really silly to try and artistically compare some cookie-cutter Photoshop templates to a hand-crafted watch.
> It's all well and good to talk about designer watches that are perfectly constructed masterpieces, but NFTs aint that.
Nonsense. NFTs are neither mass-produced digital watches nor Rolexes. They are simple watches - some mass produced and some artworks created by skilled craftsmen.
Sure, a good bunch are (looks like 20% to 50%, depending on your percentile chosen).
But the Cryptopunks are, generative and a collectible yes, but by all accounts a labour of love, an experiment before its time, given away for free at a time when no one gave a damn; it's not exactly the mass-production story you suggest.
Even if you buy wholesale into the narrative about the history of cryptopunks (and to be clear, this is a deliberately chosen narrative, the cryptopunk creators were not against making money and they gave away a large percentage of their tokens in part because they hoped the tokens they held would increase in value if they became more popular) -- but even if you take everything about their history at face value, you're still left with:
A) Pieces that do not have much artistic value outside of their position and relevance inside the ecosystem in which they were created: nobody is going to seriously claim that cryptopunks are themselves great works of art, any artistic value comes from the creation of the NFT model for generative/mass-produced artwork,
B) Pieces that are definitively mass-produced by design, and that served as a template for how other mass-produced collections could work,
C) Pieces that have been largely divorced from any artistic message that the original pieces held; the evolution of a piece designed to evoke a counter-cultural punk aesthetic into a piece that can only be controlled and owned by the richest members of society is its own possibly unintentional statement on the state of NFTs, and
D) Pieces that are significant specifically because they formed a model for other even more derivative pieces by other creators who lack even the benefit of imagination about the crypto-ecosystem itself. Cryptopunks are significant because they proved the viability of other collections like bored apes and their ilk, products that are entirely devoid of any kind of meaningful social statement or craftmanship. And one has to wonder what the actual artistic value or craftmanship is in building that model and why we should be impressed with the creators behind it.
And even if you're optimistic about all of this and think the pieces are genuinely significant and meaningful, you still wouldn't compare cryptopunks to a hand-crafted watch. They're at best historically significant, but they don't demonstrate any particularly breathtaking artistic skill, and any artistic message they were trying to make has been largely invalidated by the evolution of the space into the least "punk" community in tech. The nicest thing I can say about cryptopunks is that they have inadvertently turned into an effective satire of what the NFT community thinks about itself.
