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If you think about it the art industry is bitcoin in the real world. I find blockchain especially interesting for digital and interactive art installations.

bringtheaction 9y ago
> I find blockchain especially interesting for digital and interactive art installations. Please expand on this. Do you mean in terms of a blockchain being part of the installation itself and made "tangible" by visualization or are you thinking of something else?
- ThomPete 9y ago
  In 2004 I went to Ars Electronica[1], it's a really interesting art/technology event where technology, academia, and art scene meets. If you haven't been you really should. Anyway, one of the sessions was with an artist who did interactive art installations which included both software and physical elements. One of the discussions he had which really stuck with me was the idea of a sofware update/upgrade. I.e. a customer buys a piece which includes software. Now do you actually sell the update or do you provide that for free. The thing is that with that kind of art installations is that they are fairly easily copyable the software can be copied. This is even more true when you look at what Casey Raes and Ben Fry was doing with processing. Digital normally means abundant which means that it's hard to know if you have an original (which means artists have to invent other types of monetary models to pay their bills). Using blockchain would allow for two very important things IMO. 1) It would allow the artist to sell "the original" 2) It would allow the buyer to resell that "original" 3) it would allow for price of the original to increase. The real power of blockchain is the ability to create a secondhand market (not secondary) for used digital goods completely isolated from the original sell from the artist. [1] https://www.aec.at/ https://www.aec.at/
  - bringtheaction 9y ago
    Oh I see, yeah I could see the value of that. Primarily as a novelty I think but still interesting idea. By that I mean I wouldn't expect "all" digital art to be sold like that. But like with how someone was willing to pay a lot for the genesis crypto kitten, I think some pieces of digital art could be sold for a lot on a blockchain. But once sufficiently many different pieces of digital art have been sold like that I think the value of distinguishing between "original" and "copy" will fall back to negligible difference for new pieces. But the first different pieces of digital art will retain their value I think.
    - ThomPete 9y ago
      My belief is that more and more is becoming digitalized also culture. Culture is fundamentally an accumulation of history. It's the history part (unique history trail) which is greatly undervalued. A piece of art is valuable because of its history. That makes it more than a novelty from my perspective it makes it a fundamental part of our digital life. It's like TCP+History that has tremendous value.
matt4077 9y ago
The art market certainly has aspects best described as a "Keynesian Beauty Contest"[0], and so do Cryptocurrencies. But while the latter is almost pure "beauty contest", art retains a far stronger connection to the real world: art buyers are very rarely motivated by speculation alone. And even if they want to brag about the $X0,000,000 painting they bought, it helps if they actually like it. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keynesian_beauty_contest https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keynesian_beauty_contest
- ThomPete 9y ago
  The art world (the selling and reselling of art) is purely history + speculative and most of it IMO is definitely motivated by speculation. A piece of art can go from 20USD to 20.000USD in no time. My wife works in the auction industry so at least from having followed the world through her it would say it's mostly speculative. I think there was even an article recently about how manipulated the art world is.

bringtheaction 9y ago

> I find blockchain especially interesting for digital and interactive art installations. Please expand on this. Do you mean in terms of a blockchain being part of the installation itself and made "tangible" by visualization or are you thinking of something else?

ThomPete 9y ago
In 2004 I went to Ars Electronica[1], it's a really interesting art/technology event where technology, academia, and art scene meets. If you haven't been you really should. Anyway, one of the sessions was with an artist who did interactive art installations which included both software and physical elements. One of the discussions he had which really stuck with me was the idea of a sofware update/upgrade. I.e. a customer buys a piece which includes software. Now do you actually sell the update or do you provide that for free. The thing is that with that kind of art installations is that they are fairly easily copyable the software can be copied. This is even more true when you look at what Casey Raes and Ben Fry was doing with processing. Digital normally means abundant which means that it's hard to know if you have an original (which means artists have to invent other types of monetary models to pay their bills). Using blockchain would allow for two very important things IMO. 1) It would allow the artist to sell "the original" 2) It would allow the buyer to resell that "original" 3) it would allow for price of the original to increase. The real power of blockchain is the ability to create a secondhand market (not secondary) for used digital goods completely isolated from the original sell from the artist. [1] https://www.aec.at/ https://www.aec.at/
- bringtheaction 9y ago
  Oh I see, yeah I could see the value of that. Primarily as a novelty I think but still interesting idea. By that I mean I wouldn't expect "all" digital art to be sold like that. But like with how someone was willing to pay a lot for the genesis crypto kitten, I think some pieces of digital art could be sold for a lot on a blockchain. But once sufficiently many different pieces of digital art have been sold like that I think the value of distinguishing between "original" and "copy" will fall back to negligible difference for new pieces. But the first different pieces of digital art will retain their value I think.
  - ThomPete 9y ago
    My belief is that more and more is becoming digitalized also culture. Culture is fundamentally an accumulation of history. It's the history part (unique history trail) which is greatly undervalued. A piece of art is valuable because of its history. That makes it more than a novelty from my perspective it makes it a fundamental part of our digital life. It's like TCP+History that has tremendous value.

matt4077 9y ago

The art market certainly has aspects best described as a "Keynesian Beauty Contest"[0], and so do Cryptocurrencies. But while the latter is almost pure "beauty contest", art retains a far stronger connection to the real world: art buyers are very rarely motivated by speculation alone. And even if they want to brag about the $X0,000,000 painting they bought, it helps if they actually like it. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keynesian_beauty_contest https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keynesian_beauty_contest

ThomPete 9y ago
The art world (the selling and reselling of art) is purely history + speculative and most of it IMO is definitely motivated by speculation. A piece of art can go from 20USD to 20.000USD in no time. My wife works in the auction industry so at least from having followed the world through her it would say it's mostly speculative. I think there was even an article recently about how manipulated the art world is.