6 ms·

Do you think this is any different than real art?

piotrkaminski 6y ago
I'm told that some people derive enjoyment from looking at art, particularly if nobody else can look at it. Not sure how much they'll enjoy staring at their exclusive URL...
- rawtxapp 6y ago
  Do you need to pay millions of dollars for the enjoyment of looking at it? You can certainly do that with just a search query or a fake copy.
  - manquer 6y ago
    A fake copy of a classical painting looking close enough to the real one that only experts can say difference is going to cost in the high six digits at least. If I had enough money the difference between couple of million and 50 is not all that significant I would sure pay , same as paying for apple watch or air pods or any other premium brand quality is assured and resale value is good
    - bhupy 6y ago
      Do you have a source for that? I’m no art connoisseur, but just sampling a few famous works: Starry Night, original $80 million (https://medium.com/@comma.php/more-info-of-the-starry-night-1889-by-vincent-van-gogh-ff1a2a5985d4 https://medium.com/@comma.php/more-info-of-the-starry-night-...). Replica $500 (https://www.1st-art-gallery.com/Vincent-Van-Gogh/Starry-Night.html https://www.1st-art-gallery.com/Vincent-Van-Gogh/Starry-Nigh...) Mona Lisa, original $850 million (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most_expensive_paintings#Background https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most_expensive_paintin...), replica $250 (https://www.brushwiz.com/catalog/leonardo-da-vinci-mona-lisa-oil-painting-reproduction-104/ https://www.brushwiz.com/catalog/leonardo-da-vinci-mona-lisa...)
      - manquer 6y ago
        I am no expert either, the caveat was the replica has to be close enough to not look different. The period materials and paint alone is going to be costlier $500, the hundreds of hours if not thousands (easily in $100s/hour) it is going take an expert skilled artist in recreating a master is not cheap either. While both the links you gave claim to be hand painted, I am pretty skeptical it is possible to have an skilled artist repaint and ship in 14-21 days at a size you can choose for just $250!.
    - rawtxapp 6y ago
      > If I had enough money the difference between couple of million and 50 is not all that significant I would sure pay By many measures, if you had 100M$, you'd be somewhere in the top 0.001%, a million dollar would represent 1% of your net worth, but 50M$ would be 50% of your net worth, so I'm not sure where you came to the conclusion that that's not significant. > resale value is good Because it's the original.
      - arcticbull 6y ago
        Yes, to your point, resale values on lPods are dreadful.
  - reader_mode 6y ago
    I think art is as much about status as it is about enjoyment, if not more. Spending big bucks on NFTs buys you a status of a fool IMO but depends on the crowd I guess. At the end of the day I suspect both are ripe for money laundering schemes
    - rawtxapp 6y ago
      > I think art is as much about status as it is about enjoyment, if not more. Which is exactly my point, to you, they are fools, to them, it all makes sense.
      - reader_mode 6y ago
        But who is them ? Art is accepted as a high class thing pretty universally. Do NFTs really compare ?
    - jackstraw14 6y ago
      Amazing how almost all the commenters in every HN post about NFTs completely miss this aspect of art collecting and complain that "it's not art" or "it's pointless". With these NFTs, it's all about flipping them for a profit which will buy them whatever status they want. Just take a look at the transaction history of any NFT going around on OpenSea. Here's an example of an NFT selling for 30ETH (~$50,000) just three days after it was bought for 1ETH (~$1690). Not affiliated with CyberKongz. https://opensea.io/assets/0x495f947276749ce646f68ac8c248420045cb7b5e/73424079983647210902572285069973579475843508985221180214989722809634706685953 https://opensea.io/assets/0x495f947276749ce646f68ac8c2484200...
- smhg 6y ago
  Freeports (~storage facilities at airports) contain large amounts of boxed paintings, sculptures,... for investment purposes. No one ever looks at those. Planet Money has an episode about it [0]. [0] https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2018/02/09/584555705/episode-823-planet-monet https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2018/02/09/584555705/epis...
  - nmfisher 6y ago
    Let's not kid ourselves - a lot of art transactions simply facilitate money-laundering.
    - dvlsg 6y ago
      NFTs probably will too, so I suppose that's at least one similarity between the two.
  - piotrkaminski 6y ago
    Fair enough, but does that investment value ultimately derive from the demand from people who do enjoy looking at the art? I would expect so, otherwise it's just a kind of collective delusion. (I haven't watched the episode, perhaps they tackle this question.)
just-ok 6y ago
I mean, yeah. Physical replicas of art are imperfect, and their existence doesn’t devalue the original. Even two copies of the same piece by the same painter aren’t identical.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- berberous 6y ago
  So is photography or digital art not real art? Here is an NFT with 128 pieces, no two of which are the same: https://www.deafbeef.com/ https://www.deafbeef.com/ Or see: https://artblocks.io/ https://artblocks.io/ Is this not art? Or is your point simply that you can download it, so why pay for it? If a piece of digital art ends up being valued as art, and it was created originally as an NFT, do you not think that there are collectors that would value owning the "original" (even if you do not)? NFTs are in a bubble phase, and many of the works currently have unsustainable ridiculous valuations, but I think it's overall a good thing that digital artists can now sell collections with proven scarcity, and thus make money from it.
  - crazygringo 6y ago
    > digital artists can now sell collections with proven scarcity They can't, NFT's don't change that. Nothing stops an artist from minting a new NFT that contains or refers to exactly the same artwork. The only thing scarcity depends on is ultimately an artist's verbal promise not to make more, which they can break whenever they want. True before NFT's, and true after NFT's.
noobquestion81 6y ago
Putting aside “real” art for a moment: for many mediums, I do. It’s the same difference that explains why an original acrylic painting costs a fortune while a print is $30 in the gift shop. In many mediums a digital copy cannot capture the texture, light effects, and other features originally intended by the artist. In these mediums I think only the originals can capture the human intentions of the artist themselves, and a great deal of value stems from the fact that you hold in your physical hands a piece of a person. Only the owner can see these things. This certainly does not apply to all artistic mediums, but it does seem to apply more to the art I see in the price ranges common to NFTs.
- chii 6y ago
  what about reproductions of sculptures, where the texture is perfectly reproduced? I think authenticity has some value, but that value does not lie in the art itself.
  - insert_coin 6y ago
    Art is not the object, never has been, art is not the materials. Art is not a chord progression. A dictionary of all the words is not War and Peace. Art is not the raw data from a cmos sensor. NFTs are nothing like art.
- berberous 6y ago
  There are many art forgers that have cranked out fakes that have fooled many art experts, i.e. they are truly indistinguishable. And yet, their value, once discovered to be a fake, is negligible next to the cost of the "original". So no, most of the value (at least to the market, maybe not you personally) is not in the technical quality, but in the provenance -- in that it's the "original".
  - dogma1138 6y ago
    That’s because they are forgeries, a good reproduction costs a lot of money, not as much as the original but it’s quite common to commission reproduction copies of famous paintings ones that will use period materials and techniques can cost a small fortune on their own. This is also very common with statues that are even more expensive due to the materials and labor cost, a good copy of say David that isn’t a cast can cost high six figures easily.
root_axis 6y ago
Things that are real can be touched and experienced. Original works of art are valued because they evoke a connection to the artist. A studio recording usually sounds better than a live rendition, but people go to concerts because they want to feel a connection with the artist and the process of the art. NFTs aren't that. They're an empty abstraction; a hollow wisp of digital chattel representing nothing. NFTs are just gaudy cash grabs and a mockery of art in any form.
- freeone3000 6y ago
  And if the artist sells their art as an NFT? There's some aspects of performance, and some aspects of process, and a lot of aspects of connection.
  - root_axis 6y ago
    I won't begrudge an artist for getting paid, but an NFT is not art, it's not a process, it's just worthless CPU cycles with no inherent connection to the art. This is why one can effortlessly create an NFT for anything, it's a distributed read-only text file that can contain arbitrary text.
  - tasogare 6y ago
    An artist did a performance, minted a token, pretends the performance is linked to the token, then sells the token. An artist did a performance, wrote something on a piece of paper, pretends the performance is linked to the paper, then sells the paper. Both case are the same thing: if one doesn’t believe the "pretend" part the token/paper is worthless. And it really is since there is no tangible connection with the performance: it’s not a token that allows to see it, nor a recording. It’s just someone pretending something. NTF as used now for digital art are a scam.
    - freeone3000 6y ago
      This seems to me like saying bandcamp selling MP3s is a scam, since the proof of purchase is worthless and you can get the MP3 regardless! It's technically correct and misses the entire point.
crazygringo 6y ago
...yes? In fact I don't see anything that's the same as real art. Real physical art is unique in the vast majority of cases and NFT's do literally nothing to authenticate a physical object anyways.
- jedimastert 6y ago
  > Real physical art is unique in the vast majority of cases Forgeries are a thing, thus "authentication" > NFT's do literally nothing to authenticate a physical object anyways What does? If I got some kind of physical object that came with a physical piece of paper that says "This is totally legit" how is that any different?
  - insert_coin 6y ago
    There is no way, other than to actually watch the artist make the art piece in front of you and with no trickery to make sure something is in fact the original. When you realize that you'll understand why NFTs make no sense. Authentication is just the process of other people putting their reputation on the line to claim something is in fact what it claims to be; it is not absolute proof of anything. Authentication is not the word of god.
  - lifeformed 6y ago
    Because you're buying it for the object, not the peice of paper.
  - phs318u 6y ago
    Forgeries have been a thing yes. And many were so good that they fooled (and continue to fool) some of the foremost experts on particular types of art/artists, for years and years. And then an advance in a technique may mean the forgery is unmasked many years later. For a moment, let's leave aside digital art (NFT's have a role there). There is no way at all that an NFT can be reasonably "tethered" to a specific physical object in order to prove its authenticity. None as far as I understand it. Therefore, what's to stop me from creating a forgery a decade later (say for some art that's disappeared into a private collection), and claiming that the NFT relates to that? How does the NFT prove anything at all other than at a point in time, the actual artist used a digital signature to sign a ... a what? How do you create a digital representation of a physical object that you can tie to a specific object? It's not the signing that does it. And if we knew the answer, we wouldn't need NFT's in the first place. Let's say that the thing that the NFT signs, is a document of the provenance of the physical art. So? Experts get it wrong and provenance can be faked. The best thing that we've got that authenticates the physical art is the analysis and expertise that goes into its assessment - even though those assessments are occasionally wrong. They can in future be corrected. What does an NFT add to this?
TheButlerian 6y ago
Are you braindamaged?
p1necone 6y ago
I'm not sure how to respond to this. Yes? Like, trivially yes. When you buy a piece of traditional art you get a physical piece of art. Likewise artists having been selling digital art for ages too either in the form of prints or high res files. NFTs don't achieve anything as far as I can tell, they're effectively a receipt with extra steps. And when the thing you're buying is publically available to everyone else anyway, what use is a receipt?
- berberous 6y ago
  "I still cannot fathom why people think buying a certificate of authenticity authenticated by nobody, whose supply can be arbitrarily increased by the seller at any time, is an interesting exercise." This is what I was responding to. Here is a photograph by Andy Warhol for $95,000: https://www.artsy.net/artwork/andy-warhol-marisa-berenson-and-young-man https://www.artsy.net/artwork/andy-warhol-marisa-berenson-an... The website states that: Signature: Stamped by artist's estate, Stamped on the verso by the Estate of the Artist and The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts. Foundation … Certificate of authenticity: Included What is to prevent the artist (other than the fact this one is dead) from "arbitrarily increasing" supply, other than the fact that he has committed not to? Let's compare this with a unique audiovisual NFT: http://deafbeef.com http://deafbeef.com Here, you have a work limited to 128 pieces, which the artist has committed to cap the series at. The work can be authenticated as an original based on the blockchain, and the NFT proves the provenance. The crowd here may intuitively dislike NFTs, but it's arguments are trivially applicable to may other kinds of traditional art.
  - arcticbull 6y ago
    > The crowd here may intuitively dislike NFTs, but it's arguments are trivially applicable to may other kinds of traditional art. Your example isn't the same thing - you're buying the photograph and the certificate of authenticity. An authentic photograph. With NFTs, you're only buying the certificate of authenticity. Literally nothing else. I don't believe there's anywhere on earth a certificate of authenticity in isolation is worth more than the paper its printed on. Nobody's paying anything for a certificate of authenticity that says the Mona Lisa was painted by Leonardo da Vinci - alongside a museum map with a big red circle around where you can find it - when the art itself remains firmly in the Louvre. The NFT doesn't prove provenance of the art, only of itself. It has no connection to the art other than the connection you ascribe to it. Remember, blockchains only meaningfully encapsulate concepts wholly represented on the blockchain. Art is not such a concept. NFTs are. But they're not connected to the art in any way.

I'm told that some people derive enjoyment from looking at art, particularly if nobody else can look at it. Not sure how much they'll enjoy staring at their exclusive URL...

rawtxapp 6y ago
Do you need to pay millions of dollars for the enjoyment of looking at it? You can certainly do that with just a search query or a fake copy.
- manquer 6y ago
  A fake copy of a classical painting looking close enough to the real one that only experts can say difference is going to cost in the high six digits at least. If I had enough money the difference between couple of million and 50 is not all that significant I would sure pay , same as paying for apple watch or air pods or any other premium brand quality is assured and resale value is good
  - bhupy 6y ago
    Do you have a source for that? I’m no art connoisseur, but just sampling a few famous works: Starry Night, original $80 million (https://medium.com/@comma.php/more-info-of-the-starry-night-1889-by-vincent-van-gogh-ff1a2a5985d4 https://medium.com/@comma.php/more-info-of-the-starry-night-...). Replica $500 (https://www.1st-art-gallery.com/Vincent-Van-Gogh/Starry-Night.html https://www.1st-art-gallery.com/Vincent-Van-Gogh/Starry-Nigh...) Mona Lisa, original $850 million (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most_expensive_paintings#Background https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most_expensive_paintin...), replica $250 (https://www.brushwiz.com/catalog/leonardo-da-vinci-mona-lisa-oil-painting-reproduction-104/ https://www.brushwiz.com/catalog/leonardo-da-vinci-mona-lisa...)
    - manquer 6y ago
      I am no expert either, the caveat was the replica has to be close enough to not look different. The period materials and paint alone is going to be costlier $500, the hundreds of hours if not thousands (easily in $100s/hour) it is going take an expert skilled artist in recreating a master is not cheap either. While both the links you gave claim to be hand painted, I am pretty skeptical it is possible to have an skilled artist repaint and ship in 14-21 days at a size you can choose for just $250!.
  - rawtxapp 6y ago
    > If I had enough money the difference between couple of million and 50 is not all that significant I would sure pay By many measures, if you had 100M$, you'd be somewhere in the top 0.001%, a million dollar would represent 1% of your net worth, but 50M$ would be 50% of your net worth, so I'm not sure where you came to the conclusion that that's not significant. > resale value is good Because it's the original.
    - arcticbull 6y ago
      Yes, to your point, resale values on lPods are dreadful.
- reader_mode 6y ago
  I think art is as much about status as it is about enjoyment, if not more. Spending big bucks on NFTs buys you a status of a fool IMO but depends on the crowd I guess. At the end of the day I suspect both are ripe for money laundering schemes
  - rawtxapp 6y ago
    > I think art is as much about status as it is about enjoyment, if not more. Which is exactly my point, to you, they are fools, to them, it all makes sense.
    - reader_mode 6y ago
      But who is them ? Art is accepted as a high class thing pretty universally. Do NFTs really compare ?
  - jackstraw14 6y ago
    Amazing how almost all the commenters in every HN post about NFTs completely miss this aspect of art collecting and complain that "it's not art" or "it's pointless". With these NFTs, it's all about flipping them for a profit which will buy them whatever status they want. Just take a look at the transaction history of any NFT going around on OpenSea. Here's an example of an NFT selling for 30ETH (~$50,000) just three days after it was bought for 1ETH (~$1690). Not affiliated with CyberKongz. https://opensea.io/assets/0x495f947276749ce646f68ac8c248420045cb7b5e/73424079983647210902572285069973579475843508985221180214989722809634706685953 https://opensea.io/assets/0x495f947276749ce646f68ac8c2484200...
smhg 6y ago
Freeports (~storage facilities at airports) contain large amounts of boxed paintings, sculptures,... for investment purposes. No one ever looks at those. Planet Money has an episode about it [0]. [0] https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2018/02/09/584555705/episode-823-planet-monet https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2018/02/09/584555705/epis...
- nmfisher 6y ago
  Let's not kid ourselves - a lot of art transactions simply facilitate money-laundering.
  - dvlsg 6y ago
    NFTs probably will too, so I suppose that's at least one similarity between the two.
- piotrkaminski 6y ago
  Fair enough, but does that investment value ultimately derive from the demand from people who do enjoy looking at the art? I would expect so, otherwise it's just a kind of collective delusion. (I haven't watched the episode, perhaps they tackle this question.)

just-ok 6y ago

I mean, yeah. Physical replicas of art are imperfect, and their existence doesn’t devalue the original. Even two copies of the same piece by the same painter aren’t identical.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
berberous 6y ago
So is photography or digital art not real art? Here is an NFT with 128 pieces, no two of which are the same: https://www.deafbeef.com/ https://www.deafbeef.com/ Or see: https://artblocks.io/ https://artblocks.io/ Is this not art? Or is your point simply that you can download it, so why pay for it? If a piece of digital art ends up being valued as art, and it was created originally as an NFT, do you not think that there are collectors that would value owning the "original" (even if you do not)? NFTs are in a bubble phase, and many of the works currently have unsustainable ridiculous valuations, but I think it's overall a good thing that digital artists can now sell collections with proven scarcity, and thus make money from it.
- crazygringo 6y ago
  > digital artists can now sell collections with proven scarcity They can't, NFT's don't change that. Nothing stops an artist from minting a new NFT that contains or refers to exactly the same artwork. The only thing scarcity depends on is ultimately an artist's verbal promise not to make more, which they can break whenever they want. True before NFT's, and true after NFT's.

noobquestion81 6y ago

Putting aside “real” art for a moment: for many mediums, I do. It’s the same difference that explains why an original acrylic painting costs a fortune while a print is $30 in the gift shop. In many mediums a digital copy cannot capture the texture, light effects, and other features originally intended by the artist. In these mediums I think only the originals can capture the human intentions of the artist themselves, and a great deal of value stems from the fact that you hold in your physical hands a piece of a person. Only the owner can see these things. This certainly does not apply to all artistic mediums, but it does seem to apply more to the art I see in the price ranges common to NFTs.

chii 6y ago
what about reproductions of sculptures, where the texture is perfectly reproduced? I think authenticity has some value, but that value does not lie in the art itself.
- insert_coin 6y ago
  Art is not the object, never has been, art is not the materials. Art is not a chord progression. A dictionary of all the words is not War and Peace. Art is not the raw data from a cmos sensor. NFTs are nothing like art.
berberous 6y ago
There are many art forgers that have cranked out fakes that have fooled many art experts, i.e. they are truly indistinguishable. And yet, their value, once discovered to be a fake, is negligible next to the cost of the "original". So no, most of the value (at least to the market, maybe not you personally) is not in the technical quality, but in the provenance -- in that it's the "original".
- dogma1138 6y ago
  That’s because they are forgeries, a good reproduction costs a lot of money, not as much as the original but it’s quite common to commission reproduction copies of famous paintings ones that will use period materials and techniques can cost a small fortune on their own. This is also very common with statues that are even more expensive due to the materials and labor cost, a good copy of say David that isn’t a cast can cost high six figures easily.

root_axis 6y ago

Things that are real can be touched and experienced. Original works of art are valued because they evoke a connection to the artist. A studio recording usually sounds better than a live rendition, but people go to concerts because they want to feel a connection with the artist and the process of the art. NFTs aren't that. They're an empty abstraction; a hollow wisp of digital chattel representing nothing. NFTs are just gaudy cash grabs and a mockery of art in any form.

freeone3000 6y ago
And if the artist sells their art as an NFT? There's some aspects of performance, and some aspects of process, and a lot of aspects of connection.
- root_axis 6y ago
  I won't begrudge an artist for getting paid, but an NFT is not art, it's not a process, it's just worthless CPU cycles with no inherent connection to the art. This is why one can effortlessly create an NFT for anything, it's a distributed read-only text file that can contain arbitrary text.
- tasogare 6y ago
  An artist did a performance, minted a token, pretends the performance is linked to the token, then sells the token. An artist did a performance, wrote something on a piece of paper, pretends the performance is linked to the paper, then sells the paper. Both case are the same thing: if one doesn’t believe the "pretend" part the token/paper is worthless. And it really is since there is no tangible connection with the performance: it’s not a token that allows to see it, nor a recording. It’s just someone pretending something. NTF as used now for digital art are a scam.
  - freeone3000 6y ago
    This seems to me like saying bandcamp selling MP3s is a scam, since the proof of purchase is worthless and you can get the MP3 regardless! It's technically correct and misses the entire point.

crazygringo 6y ago

...yes? In fact I don't see anything that's the same as real art. Real physical art is unique in the vast majority of cases and NFT's do literally nothing to authenticate a physical object anyways.

jedimastert 6y ago
> Real physical art is unique in the vast majority of cases Forgeries are a thing, thus "authentication" > NFT's do literally nothing to authenticate a physical object anyways What does? If I got some kind of physical object that came with a physical piece of paper that says "This is totally legit" how is that any different?
- insert_coin 6y ago
  There is no way, other than to actually watch the artist make the art piece in front of you and with no trickery to make sure something is in fact the original. When you realize that you'll understand why NFTs make no sense. Authentication is just the process of other people putting their reputation on the line to claim something is in fact what it claims to be; it is not absolute proof of anything. Authentication is not the word of god.
- lifeformed 6y ago
  Because you're buying it for the object, not the peice of paper.
- phs318u 6y ago
  Forgeries have been a thing yes. And many were so good that they fooled (and continue to fool) some of the foremost experts on particular types of art/artists, for years and years. And then an advance in a technique may mean the forgery is unmasked many years later. For a moment, let's leave aside digital art (NFT's have a role there). There is no way at all that an NFT can be reasonably "tethered" to a specific physical object in order to prove its authenticity. None as far as I understand it. Therefore, what's to stop me from creating a forgery a decade later (say for some art that's disappeared into a private collection), and claiming that the NFT relates to that? How does the NFT prove anything at all other than at a point in time, the actual artist used a digital signature to sign a ... a what? How do you create a digital representation of a physical object that you can tie to a specific object? It's not the signing that does it. And if we knew the answer, we wouldn't need NFT's in the first place. Let's say that the thing that the NFT signs, is a document of the provenance of the physical art. So? Experts get it wrong and provenance can be faked. The best thing that we've got that authenticates the physical art is the analysis and expertise that goes into its assessment - even though those assessments are occasionally wrong. They can in future be corrected. What does an NFT add to this?

TheButlerian 6y ago

Are you braindamaged?

p1necone 6y ago

I'm not sure how to respond to this. Yes? Like, trivially yes. When you buy a piece of traditional art you get a physical piece of art. Likewise artists having been selling digital art for ages too either in the form of prints or high res files. NFTs don't achieve anything as far as I can tell, they're effectively a receipt with extra steps. And when the thing you're buying is publically available to everyone else anyway, what use is a receipt?

berberous 6y ago
"I still cannot fathom why people think buying a certificate of authenticity authenticated by nobody, whose supply can be arbitrarily increased by the seller at any time, is an interesting exercise." This is what I was responding to. Here is a photograph by Andy Warhol for $95,000: https://www.artsy.net/artwork/andy-warhol-marisa-berenson-and-young-man https://www.artsy.net/artwork/andy-warhol-marisa-berenson-an... The website states that: Signature: Stamped by artist's estate, Stamped on the verso by the Estate of the Artist and The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts. Foundation … Certificate of authenticity: Included What is to prevent the artist (other than the fact this one is dead) from "arbitrarily increasing" supply, other than the fact that he has committed not to? Let's compare this with a unique audiovisual NFT: http://deafbeef.com http://deafbeef.com Here, you have a work limited to 128 pieces, which the artist has committed to cap the series at. The work can be authenticated as an original based on the blockchain, and the NFT proves the provenance. The crowd here may intuitively dislike NFTs, but it's arguments are trivially applicable to may other kinds of traditional art.
- arcticbull 6y ago
  > The crowd here may intuitively dislike NFTs, but it's arguments are trivially applicable to may other kinds of traditional art. Your example isn't the same thing - you're buying the photograph and the certificate of authenticity. An authentic photograph. With NFTs, you're only buying the certificate of authenticity. Literally nothing else. I don't believe there's anywhere on earth a certificate of authenticity in isolation is worth more than the paper its printed on. Nobody's paying anything for a certificate of authenticity that says the Mona Lisa was painted by Leonardo da Vinci - alongside a museum map with a big red circle around where you can find it - when the art itself remains firmly in the Louvre. The NFT doesn't prove provenance of the art, only of itself. It has no connection to the art other than the connection you ascribe to it. Remember, blockchains only meaningfully encapsulate concepts wholly represented on the blockchain. Art is not such a concept. NFTs are. But they're not connected to the art in any way.