This blog isnt about the crypto market which is an extension of capitalism but the definition of the word ART instead. NFTs, writes the Guardianuk columnist, is about the pricing of ownership. Blockchain offers certificates of authenticity that cannot be replicated.
What is wrong with that picture? Obviously, the market has found a brand new way to further debase the concept of material ownership, which we already find nonsensical. We only own our bodies, all the rest is borrowed from birth to death.
The media describes it as a phenomenon. We call it the latest mania of the crowds. We know too well how this is going to end, based on our knowledge of history. This new market is booming and the token boom hit the music industry last March. The trend shows no sign of slowing down!
Today, we really started wondering about the direction Art is taking under the influence of the crypto market. To be honest, we had already thrown in the towel a long while ago because artistic success is more about connections than anything else. It was, even so, centuries ago when aristocratic sponsorship was defining talent. The big difference here is that at the time artists had genius and were inspired masters exploring some metaphysical meaning of life. It is the complete opposite today, getting rich quick schemes are pervasive. The entertainment industry is definitely fond of its high-ranked puppets.
Since the rise of capitalism, things have gone a lot worse for artists. 99.9% will never attain a moment of fame (even short-lived) because they do not have the financial resources to let the world know about their creations. This harsh reality check says a lot about our societal inadequacies: our system of values is really screwed up big time.
A society that doesn't promote creativity as a way of life is setting itself up for a debacle!
NFTs are unique assets verified by blockchain technology, CNN reads. In other words, the article wants us to believe that technology surpasses human creative and intuitive input.
But we immediately saw the flaw in that sentence: where is the point to have a certificate of ownership (of something that is reproducible) that is not replicable? The commerce of art is the mirror of the insanity we'll have to come to terms with, and rather sooner than later.
Further, inspiration comes from somewhere, even for that modern painter, Sai Tuombli, here below and whose artwork sells between $2 and $75 million apiece.
We really don't mind people who have bad taste, after all, beauty is in the eyes of the beholder and we understand that quite well. What we criticize here is the financialization of mediocrity to a degree unseen before. Throwing millions of dollars at such poor artworks while the biosphere is suffocating from all sorts of chemicals and humanity is in the grip of a medical dictatorship cynically highlights that we've gone beyond redemption.
Life is all about the pleasure to create and emulating nature is key to planetary betterment. The more technology evolves the more we have to develop our awareness and empathy because keeping everything balanced is what will ensure the success of our endeavors.
A jpeg for $70m: welcome to the strange world of cryptocurrency art (2021)
0n 11 March, one of the art world’s signature can-you-believe-it moments made global headlines: a digital-only artwork sold for more than $69m, the third highest price ever paid for an artwork at auction. It was a digital collage by the artist Mike Winkelmann, known as Beeple, who until October had never sold a print for more than $100. It’s worth noting: buying an NFT does not necessarily mean you are buying the copyright to something, or even the only digital copy; many NFTs are minted for videos or images that are easily accessible elsewhere on the internet. (Even images of Beeple’s record-smashing work are visible all over the web.) But an NFT confers a particular kind of ownership rights – it’s like purchasing not a particular thing, but your ownership of that thing
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/mar/17/cryptocurrency--at-digital-only-artwork-nfts-collecting
(CNN Business 2021) Non-fungible tokens, or NFTs, are the latest cryptocurrency phenomenon to go mainstream. And after Christie's auction house sold the first-ever NFT artwork — a collage of images by digital artist Beeple for a whopping $69.3 million last week — NFTs have suddenly captured the world's attention.
So what are NFTs?In the simplest terms, NFTs transform digital works of art and other collectibles into one-of-a- kind, verifiable assets that are easy to trade on the blockchain. Although that may be far from simple for the uninitiated to understand, the payoff has been huge for many artists, musicians, influencers and the like, with investors spending top dollar to own NFT versions of digital images. For example, Jack Dorsey's first tweet is now bidding for $2.5 million, a video clip of a LeBron James slam dunk sold for over $200,000 and a decade-old "Nyan Cat" GIF went for $600,000. https://www.cnn.com/2021/03/17/business/what-is-nft-meaning-fe-series/index.html