Bitcoin and other scams

Because it puts them out of jobs, lol.

Selling an NFT of Nanocrystal getting off the planet, with a starting bid of 1 bitcoin

Thing is there is an awful lot more actual artwork by amazing traditional, digital and photographic artists than just apes and pixel punks. They have given artists a space to actually sell their work.

I mean I have had my pics published in books, magazines, websites and sent them to friends and family who all say you should sell them. But you really couldn't despite the above publicity.
Now armed with a shilly twitter account I have sold a couple of hundred dollars worth of pics from my HD in a little over a month. No idea what will come of it, if I'll sell more, if the price of my stuff will rise I can't say but it's rekindled my love of photography and astronomy plus there will always be a 20% royalty anytime someone wants to sell it on.

If you can draw or take a picture you can easily get some sales, maybe not those eye watering numbers the crypto rich are trading but 5-10$ for a pic seems reasonable to me rather than it be lost to the hard drive cupboard gods.

It also has the ability to fuck spotify off and let musicians actually get paid for their work again.

One of my mates is really into NFTs and was showing me the shitty gifs he's spent tens of thousands on the other day. I'd call him a twat but anoyingly he seems to be selling them on for even more tens of thousands so I think it would fall on deaf ears. He's already loaded though so can afford to take these kind of risks. The big twat.

You cant really even call it a risk. Everyone is buying these speculatively and the secondary resale market is going to burn pretty much everybody. Nobody is going to buy a Bored Ape NFT from you.

Although, having said that, one or two artist seem to be bucking the trend. I absolutely cant see the appeal in XCOPY, though, so maybe Im just too old for this lark.

That is one of things I find so interesting about NFT art, you can right click and save if all you want is the pretty picture. But that's not why people are paying quite a lot for them. So why?

Bragging rights among peers (to anyone else they just appear stupid)? Or pure investment? A lot of the talk comes down on the pure speculation side. The value of paying for a piece is in selling it for a higher price. The smart contracts that ensure a cut on every future sale is a part of that. It's like one of them chain letters that were passed around when I was a kid. Send a chewing gum to these ten people and before you know it you'll get a gazillion chewing gums. (Ha, a pyramid scheme)

It reminds me of some photorealists where the end goal was to have a picture of their raster-mimicking painting printed in a newspaper, making it indistinguishable from a rasterised photo. For the lulz.

Well, I mean, obviously it is completely different. I cant right click and save the materials, brush strokes and environmental aging of the Mona Lisa.

Rothko is amazing, though.

I don't know about £100m amazing (and I'll never have that sort of money anyway), but then, I can go and see them and stand amazed in the Tate Modern for free.

I'm yet to see an NFT that does that. I have nothing against them, fwiw. If people want to spend their money that way, it's up to them and if artists are getting paid, good.

Does it give you access to the Bored Ape toilet is the real question.

So turns out Ubi are basically shunning any and all responsibility over things going tits up.

I'm not normally one to boast about my achievements, but I've only lost a tenner on crypto this month.

These are valuable now?

I failed to make myself clear. I agree that the speculative part of the art market is no different from specualtion in any other market, NFTs included.

What I find interesting about NFT "native" art, is how utterly uninteresting and redundant it is as art. Whether or not you like Rothko is matter of taste, so rather unimportant to discuss, but if you know a bit about art you know that he pushed boundaries and that he created something new.

What I find interesting about the big ticket NFT artists is how much they are shaped by the medium, and environment, in which they exist and create. Rather than pushing boundaries, or using their creativity to say something, anything, about the world, they optimise for financial speculation. So while I find their variations on Face Your Manga to be anything but art, the fact that there's a big trend where a bunch of people are doing the same thing, and managing to capture peoples attention, says a lot. 

Or how you reply immediately fell back on the financial speculation side, rather than try to think about cryptopunks et al as art. 

That's what interests me. The art as commentary on our society is a byproduct of the art.