It's impressive how quickly the NFT space has abandoned any semblance of selling unique artwork, and converged on ten thousand variants of "randomly generated animal pictures" with half of them being monkeys because they're cargo-culting Bored Ape Yacht Club. Ironically in trying to create "digital scarcity" they've lowered the bar to entry so far that their "scarce" assets are buried under an endless avalanche of nearly indistinguishable "scarce" assets. Market price is the only thing that would set them apart, but even that's meaningless due to the prevalence of wash trading.
Is it impressive? I would've thought this is exactly what we expected. Actual artists are off making stuff they can sell, and 99.99% of them don't know what an NFT is. Meanwhile there's a whole community of teenagers on the internet who don't make anything but do know about NFTs.
If you run the numbers on "artists who know/care about NFTs" vs "Idiots on the internet gullible enough to buy into anythin" I think 10,000:1 is generous.
> Actual artists are off making stuff they can sell, and 99.99% of them don't know what an NFT is.
In my experience, it's the opposite. If you're an artist with an internet connection, then you know about NFTs.
Art communities across the internet have been fractured by the topic this year. Some have banned the posting of NFTs[1], some have built software to alert members when their work has been stolen and turned into NFTs[2]. Artists who speak out against NFTs are frequently dogpiled by crypto enthusiasts claiming that they don't care about their fellow artists[3]. Even famous artists know what NFTs are[4], since they've all been approached at some point by a crypto investor who wants them to make NFTs. As an artist, it's difficult to escape the topic, and it's causing quite a bit of backlash.
The thing that saddens me the most is that cats used to own the internet, and I find the monkeys not so fascinating.
I was also hesitating to post this because I was afraid that some cryptobro or what-you-call-them would take this complaint literally and open an NFT trading site for cat pictures.
It's incredible how they don't see how bad these projects look, so my concern is real.
Same thing happened in the online beat space. It used to be producers creating music. Now it's a race to the bottom. Who can download a pre made loop the fastest and put the same drums over everything then sell it for $5. I don't know what has happened with humanity. Everyone just wants to make a quick buck.
Were we ever so different? Perhaps what has changed is not our nature, but the affordances present in our environment. For all our billions of years of evolutionary history until just about last Tuesday, there has never existed a global market with virtually zero cost of creating “goods” to sell. Now, with digital “assets”, there is.
The ratio of perceived benefit (make money from selling shitty NFTs or shitty beats) to cost (essentially zero cost to mint a shitty NFT or create a shitty beat) is infinite, NaN, divide-by-zero. Of course this results in near-infinite supply and thus most people don’t make any money. But the zero-ish cost means the flow of supply doesn’t stop.
The Bored Apes are selling entry to a community not art.
At any rate, as far as I can see artists I enjoy in real life like Refik Anadol are benefiting from and creating interesting art around them. Most NFTs are of course crap (as per sturgeon's) or simply not about art in the first place but I just don't think that means as much as people with an axe to grind think it means.
> Lil Baby, the night’s headliner, finally took the stage at around 1AM. Most people had left by then. I was drinking my last vodka of the night and zoning out to “Life Goes On,” though, and a small group of attendees bounced near the front of the stage, and there was something inspirational about Lil Baby’s utter lack of concern with how small the audience had grown and how utterly dry the vibe in Brooklyn Steel was. He had none of Julian Casablancas’ cool kid embarrassment or Chris Rock’s self-consciousness. He was simply getting to the bag. “Brooklyn, if you’re making more money this year than last year, make some noise!” his hype man screamed to the crowd’s delight.
as far as I can tell, they’ve thrown a few parties, and they have a Discord.
the subtext is basically, for fools “you could end up hanging out with Snoop Dogg!” and for smarter people “you could find out what the next craze is early enough to flip it for a profit!”
