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> If an artist makes a painting, that original painting has collectible value. This misunderstands the ultimate reason why art becomes valuable. It has nothin

> If an artist makes a painting, that original painting has collectible value. This misunderstands the ultimate reason why art becomes valuable. It has nothing to do with the scarcity itself. There's a billion works of art out there that are 1/1 originals and yet are worthless. So scarcity alone doesn't bring the value. What does? Mostly media and public relations originally, and if an artist gets attention for long enough, government, non-profit and educational institutions will legitimize that media coverage and write an artist into the mainstream "lexicon" for history going forward. You need both the scarcity combined with the mainstream knowledge of an artists name to create that value. The problem with NFTs is, now that the media channels that create "star" artists are getting more and more decentralized, the chances your friend will know the names of the same artists as you is diminished. Everybody's instagram feed is different, so there isn't the same shared language that existed in the past to attach value to these scarce objects. That, combined with the fact that you can't hang it on your wall as a signaling device to show off to your friends or prospective mating partners...is the reason why NFTs will never be as valuable as pre-internet art.

lfmunoz4 5y ago
NFTs are a better signaling device because although you cannot hang it on your wall, you change make it your avatar.
pessimizer 5y ago
> Mostly media and public relations originally, and if an artist gets attention for long enough, government, non-profit and educational institutions will legitimize that media coverage and write an artist into the mainstream "lexicon" for history going forward. I think a big part of it is that once an artist has this status, it becomes part of the industry that tracks provenance and detects forgeries. If your cousin's painting was valuable without being part of this system, you could crank out 100 of them and no one would know which one was the original, or whether your cousin actually painted the other 99. So in this way you're begging the question a little bit. If scarcity alone doesn't bring value, provable scarcity might.

lfmunoz4 5y ago

NFTs are a better signaling device because although you cannot hang it on your wall, you change make it your avatar.

pessimizer 5y ago

> Mostly media and public relations originally, and if an artist gets attention for long enough, government, non-profit and educational institutions will legitimize that media coverage and write an artist into the mainstream "lexicon" for history going forward. I think a big part of it is that once an artist has this status, it becomes part of the industry that tracks provenance and detects forgeries. If your cousin's painting was valuable without being part of this system, you could crank out 100 of them and no one would know which one was the original, or whether your cousin actually painted the other 99. So in this way you're begging the question a little bit. If scarcity alone doesn't bring value, provable scarcity might.