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I am very critical/skeptical of more or less all things crypto, but I heard an interesting point from an artist recently who had begun selling NFTs of their wor

I am very critical/skeptical of more or less all things crypto, but I heard an interesting point from an artist recently who had begun selling NFTs of their work. It is in line with the thinking around the Rolex example in the article, but in my opinion, more salient: I asked them about what appeared to me as the inherent silliness of selling an "exclusive" tokenized image, which could be easily copied with a right-click for free. Their response was that this is essentially no different from print making. When you buy a print, you are buying something you have the means to produce yourself. You aren't paying for the quality of the print making materials--you could order identical prints of the image from a print shop, or if you're less concerned with quality, simply print at home. But when you buy a print from the artist, you're paying for that signature that says "#3 of 100." There's nothing stopping the artist from printing more, and there's nothing stopping random people from duplicating the print, but we're comfortable with the idea that a signature confers a "uniqueness" to the print that makes it valuable. I don't know if that is an argument against print making or a case for NFTs, but I found the point interesting. Context: I own no NFTs nor do I plan to.

Gigachad 4y ago
Prints and NFTs are very different. You will very rarely be able to print it yourself because high quality copies will not be available to you. You also wouldn’t expect a print to have resale value. You are buying it because it looks nice on your wall. Not as an investment. NFTs are still a load of crap. Im glad some artists found a way to make money off them, but that doesn’t make them any less of a scam.
- aaronbrethorst 4y ago
  A print, especially a classic gelatin silver B&W or c-print, is something the artist has ostensibly personally labored over. It is as much a product of their craft as the original source material was, whether that was a negative, positive, digital image, or PSD file. NFTs...eh, not so much.
  - web4 4y ago
    most artists will hire professional printmakers and printers. just because a photographer is good at shooting does not mean they are good in the dark room. when we talk about editioned prints, most of the effort is not in the print. a screen print takes a couple hours to make, an Epson print is a click of the button. but the work being printed might have been built from years of practice as an artist.
- web4 4y ago
  artist prints are routinely forged and resold. this is such a problem in high end artists work like Hirst that they must find complex ways to certify and authenticate their signed prints. sometimes this is with holographic stickers, or separate certificates of authenticity, or even non NFT blockchain certification. most signed prints are not bought because of what the content is, but because of the signature. you can buy unsigned prints of many notable artists work for 20 bucks while the same signed version sells at sothebys for thousands. users should not expect NFT to have any more or less resale value than a signed print. but because there is currently a market for it, it is easier to sell a token than a print. in future this may change if tokens are as commonly distributed and purchased as prints are.
  - dmitriid 4y ago
    > artist prints are routinely forged and resold. this is such a problem in high end artists work like Hirst that they must find complex ways to certify and authenticate their signed prints. NFTs make this problem worse. E.g. OpenSea is awash with stolen art and removed the ability to contest the problem several months ago.
    - web4 4y ago
      the blockchain allows anybody to publish nfts that point to any media, so naturally there is a lot of spam and copy-minting. anybody can publish to OpenSea a Picasso NFT but this does not mean it will be valued by the market as a Picasso. the same is true of an impersonator trying to mint a new Pak or Beeple or whoever you think is a popular nft artist. almost all of these "thefts" come in the form of social engineering and impersonation rather than forging the token itself. and if you look at the data, 99% of these copy-mints are not actually selling and are not making any impact in the market. a copy-mint of crypto punks is trivially easy to discern as a fake because its contract hash will be uniquely different than the crypto punks contract, which has a long and clear historical trail associated with it on chain. if a copyminter starts to post new work that resembles a popular artist like Beeple, it will be under a new public key hash or address, and also easy to discern. compare this crypto art copy-minting to paintings like Salvator Mundi which countless experts have been investigating for years and still are not able to discern the authenticity of the painting despite its $450 million price tag.
radicalbyte 4y ago
Only you have the print in your position. An NFT is like buying a ticket which gives a deed of ownership to a specific print of a specific book. The book itself is available in public for anyone to read for as long as the original seller cares to look after it.
_Nat_ 4y ago
I sometimes wonder if they get that there's no "THE blockchain". I mean, an NFT would tend to exist on a particular blockchain. If that blockchain forks (e.g., [as Bitcoin's done a number of times](https://www.investopedia.com/tech/history-bitcoin-hard-forks/ https://www.investopedia.com/tech/history-bitcoin-hard-forks... )), then it's not unique, but rather exists multiple times -- potentially with different copies being owned by different folks. Plus folks could create duplicate NFT's of the same (by simply minting new ones), presumably on the same blockchain or/and others. And then, if an NFT is reliant on external-resources (like links to a host-server), as I've heard that most are, then presumably those could break and even if someone continues to "own" an NFT on some particular blockchain, the NFT itself would seem decontextualized and essentially meaningless. Then, durability isn't ensured even on a continuous blockchain, as blockchains can elect to remove stuff (e.g., through forks or filter-protocols). Presumably blockchains would ultimately want to truncate historical stuff; it'd seem strange to assume that an NFT would necessarily be carried through such a process. Then there's the non-optimality of primitive blockchains. This is, when there're innovations, we'd presumably expect folks to create new blockchains that may displace older ones, retiring prior-NFT's in the process. Then if we're talking long-term, historic value, then we'd probably consider stuff like advances in cryptography mooting the original signatures, and just generally how ancient blockchains would seem to be of little interest to those in the future. Plus, I'd imagine that advanced AI artists would render the concept of trivial art being in any way non-arbitrary obsolete. Long rant short, it's just weird to hear non-technical folks seemingly believing that blockchains confer "uniqueness" outside of more limited, subjective contexts.
- kayamon 4y ago
  Satoshi proved that any blockchain that isn't currently the leader won't be mined and therefore will fall into disuse. Anyone who read the paper understands this, the principle of what's called Bitcoin maximalism. So if you want your money/NFTs/whatever to continue to be secure in future, there is ultimately only going to be one global blockchain, singular, so it's very much correct to use the term "THE blockchain".
  - Jensson 4y ago
255kb 4y ago
How is that different from the current art market where you can already buy some painting with a high degree of confidence that it's an original, numbered, signed by the artist, etc. Blockchain does not add more confidence to these kind of transactions. You still need middleman to authenticate the art, that it wasn't stolen or whatever. Writing ownership in a blockchain, why not, but for all the famous crypto use cases (real estate, concert tickets, art, etc.) these only solve a very small part of the problem (if there is one to solve...) and I don't see how you can cut all the middleman that are always here for a reason.
- donatj 4y ago
  With a good quality physical fake it can be hard for even the artist themselves to know if they made it. An NFT, they know for certain without question if they minted it or not. That’s the whole schtick. You have a jpeg or whatever provable signed by the artist. Sure you can make copies, but those copies are provably not signed by the artist.
  - account-5 4y ago
    For me the main issue is do I care? Leaving aside the: "which Blockchain/NTF represents the real image" issue, you actually have to give a crap about that stuff. That's where the value lies. I'm not sure most people do.
    - donatj 4y ago
      I think basically everyone aside from the most devout nihilists assign more value to a copy of photograph signed by the artist than a non-signed copy. It's literally just a digital equivalent.
- web4 4y ago
  the main use case is not an oil or acrylic painting but digital art and digital media. look at highest sales on any platform its memes, gifs, JPGs, digital photographs, 3D renderings, videos, generative art. there was no easy way to distribute signed editions of digital media in limited capacity and have it certified by the artist themself, the only option was to make it a signed physical print which is not a digital substrate. the only middleman you requires is blockchain indexer like etherscan or TheGraph or an alternative , and if you do not trust those platforms you can run your own local node as the data is not owned by any single entity.
piaste 4y ago
> But when you buy a print from the artist, you're paying for that signature that says "#3 of 100." There's nothing stopping the artist from printing more, and there's nothing stopping random people from duplicating the print, but we're comfortable with the idea that a signature confers a "uniqueness" to the print that makes it valuable. I'll bite: I also find 'limited editions' with no unique characteristic to be idiotic. If they have some unique characteristics, whether it's a LE book with a different cover illustration and fancy binding or a LE Ferrari with a specially-tuned V12, then they're actually rare objects and it's fine. But if your artist's print is 100% identical except for that "#3 of 100" signature, I wouldn't pay one more cent for the privilege of owning that signature. Same with autographs on books or CD/vinyl covers. Picasso and Hendrix were interesting people and artists, but there is nothing particularly interesting about their signatures and they don't improve the painting or CD in any way *. Paying hundreds of dollars for a perfectly ordinary book that some sweaty fan brought to an exhausted author at an event to have him quickly scribble "John Q. Author" on it is, in my opinion, exactly as pointless as paying hundreds of dollars for a NFT of that book. * Some trivial exceptions: if a painting's author is disputed, the signature can help solve the dispute. And some artists do have interesting signatures (e.g. Dali). For the vast majority of 'limited prints' neither consideration applies.
- namaria 4y ago
  Funny you should mention Dali, as he famously sold blank sheets of paper with his signature.
  - piaste 4y ago
    Indeed, Dalí would absolutely be minting NFTs if he were alive today. And this is one of the most unkind things I might have ever said about NFTs.
mr_gibbins 4y ago
I'm not an artist and I don't understand art, beyond liking something tangible with an aesthetic that appeals to me. So I'll buy prints, or originals, that I like, and that I don't mind looking at every day, and hang them on my wall. I have no objection paying a reasonable price for them either - artists have to eat. The issue I have with NFTs is that they are not art. They are just vessels signifying financial worth. The worth of a painting, a print to me is aesthetic, not financial. But there is no aesthetic worth in an NFT. I can't hang it on my wall. I can't enjoy it every day. So if we treat NFTs as tokens of value without any artistic worth, they become no more than a variant of another cryptocoin, albeit a 'unique' coin worth $XXX, and by decoupling the artistic argument from the financial argument, all the 'silliness' goes away. It's simply a store of value.

Gigachad 4y ago

Prints and NFTs are very different. You will very rarely be able to print it yourself because high quality copies will not be available to you. You also wouldn’t expect a print to have resale value. You are buying it because it looks nice on your wall. Not as an investment. NFTs are still a load of crap. Im glad some artists found a way to make money off them, but that doesn’t make them any less of a scam.

aaronbrethorst 4y ago
A print, especially a classic gelatin silver B&W or c-print, is something the artist has ostensibly personally labored over. It is as much a product of their craft as the original source material was, whether that was a negative, positive, digital image, or PSD file. NFTs...eh, not so much.
- web4 4y ago
  most artists will hire professional printmakers and printers. just because a photographer is good at shooting does not mean they are good in the dark room. when we talk about editioned prints, most of the effort is not in the print. a screen print takes a couple hours to make, an Epson print is a click of the button. but the work being printed might have been built from years of practice as an artist.
web4 4y ago
artist prints are routinely forged and resold. this is such a problem in high end artists work like Hirst that they must find complex ways to certify and authenticate their signed prints. sometimes this is with holographic stickers, or separate certificates of authenticity, or even non NFT blockchain certification. most signed prints are not bought because of what the content is, but because of the signature. you can buy unsigned prints of many notable artists work for 20 bucks while the same signed version sells at sothebys for thousands. users should not expect NFT to have any more or less resale value than a signed print. but because there is currently a market for it, it is easier to sell a token than a print. in future this may change if tokens are as commonly distributed and purchased as prints are.
- dmitriid 4y ago
  > artist prints are routinely forged and resold. this is such a problem in high end artists work like Hirst that they must find complex ways to certify and authenticate their signed prints. NFTs make this problem worse. E.g. OpenSea is awash with stolen art and removed the ability to contest the problem several months ago.
  - web4 4y ago
    the blockchain allows anybody to publish nfts that point to any media, so naturally there is a lot of spam and copy-minting. anybody can publish to OpenSea a Picasso NFT but this does not mean it will be valued by the market as a Picasso. the same is true of an impersonator trying to mint a new Pak or Beeple or whoever you think is a popular nft artist. almost all of these "thefts" come in the form of social engineering and impersonation rather than forging the token itself. and if you look at the data, 99% of these copy-mints are not actually selling and are not making any impact in the market. a copy-mint of crypto punks is trivially easy to discern as a fake because its contract hash will be uniquely different than the crypto punks contract, which has a long and clear historical trail associated with it on chain. if a copyminter starts to post new work that resembles a popular artist like Beeple, it will be under a new public key hash or address, and also easy to discern. compare this crypto art copy-minting to paintings like Salvator Mundi which countless experts have been investigating for years and still are not able to discern the authenticity of the painting despite its $450 million price tag.

radicalbyte 4y ago

Only you have the print in your position. An NFT is like buying a ticket which gives a deed of ownership to a specific print of a specific book. The book itself is available in public for anyone to read for as long as the original seller cares to look after it.

_Nat_ 4y ago

I sometimes wonder if they get that there's no "THE blockchain". I mean, an NFT would tend to exist on a particular blockchain. If that blockchain forks (e.g., [as Bitcoin's done a number of times](https://www.investopedia.com/tech/history-bitcoin-hard-forks/ https://www.investopedia.com/tech/history-bitcoin-hard-forks... )), then it's not unique, but rather exists multiple times -- potentially with different copies being owned by different folks. Plus folks could create duplicate NFT's of the same (by simply minting new ones), presumably on the same blockchain or/and others. And then, if an NFT is reliant on external-resources (like links to a host-server), as I've heard that most are, then presumably those could break and even if someone continues to "own" an NFT on some particular blockchain, the NFT itself would seem decontextualized and essentially meaningless. Then, durability isn't ensured even on a continuous blockchain, as blockchains can elect to remove stuff (e.g., through forks or filter-protocols). Presumably blockchains would ultimately want to truncate historical stuff; it'd seem strange to assume that an NFT would necessarily be carried through such a process. Then there's the non-optimality of primitive blockchains. This is, when there're innovations, we'd presumably expect folks to create new blockchains that may displace older ones, retiring prior-NFT's in the process. Then if we're talking long-term, historic value, then we'd probably consider stuff like advances in cryptography mooting the original signatures, and just generally how ancient blockchains would seem to be of little interest to those in the future. Plus, I'd imagine that advanced AI artists would render the concept of trivial art being in any way non-arbitrary obsolete. Long rant short, it's just weird to hear non-technical folks seemingly believing that blockchains confer "uniqueness" outside of more limited, subjective contexts.

kayamon 4y ago
Satoshi proved that any blockchain that isn't currently the leader won't be mined and therefore will fall into disuse. Anyone who read the paper understands this, the principle of what's called Bitcoin maximalism. So if you want your money/NFTs/whatever to continue to be secure in future, there is ultimately only going to be one global blockchain, singular, so it's very much correct to use the term "THE blockchain".
- Jensson 4y ago

255kb 4y ago

How is that different from the current art market where you can already buy some painting with a high degree of confidence that it's an original, numbered, signed by the artist, etc. Blockchain does not add more confidence to these kind of transactions. You still need middleman to authenticate the art, that it wasn't stolen or whatever. Writing ownership in a blockchain, why not, but for all the famous crypto use cases (real estate, concert tickets, art, etc.) these only solve a very small part of the problem (if there is one to solve...) and I don't see how you can cut all the middleman that are always here for a reason.

donatj 4y ago
With a good quality physical fake it can be hard for even the artist themselves to know if they made it. An NFT, they know for certain without question if they minted it or not. That’s the whole schtick. You have a jpeg or whatever provable signed by the artist. Sure you can make copies, but those copies are provably not signed by the artist.
- account-5 4y ago
  For me the main issue is do I care? Leaving aside the: "which Blockchain/NTF represents the real image" issue, you actually have to give a crap about that stuff. That's where the value lies. I'm not sure most people do.
  - donatj 4y ago
    I think basically everyone aside from the most devout nihilists assign more value to a copy of photograph signed by the artist than a non-signed copy. It's literally just a digital equivalent.
web4 4y ago
the main use case is not an oil or acrylic painting but digital art and digital media. look at highest sales on any platform its memes, gifs, JPGs, digital photographs, 3D renderings, videos, generative art. there was no easy way to distribute signed editions of digital media in limited capacity and have it certified by the artist themself, the only option was to make it a signed physical print which is not a digital substrate. the only middleman you requires is blockchain indexer like etherscan or TheGraph or an alternative , and if you do not trust those platforms you can run your own local node as the data is not owned by any single entity.

piaste 4y ago

> But when you buy a print from the artist, you're paying for that signature that says "#3 of 100." There's nothing stopping the artist from printing more, and there's nothing stopping random people from duplicating the print, but we're comfortable with the idea that a signature confers a "uniqueness" to the print that makes it valuable. I'll bite: I also find 'limited editions' with no unique characteristic to be idiotic. If they have some unique characteristics, whether it's a LE book with a different cover illustration and fancy binding or a LE Ferrari with a specially-tuned V12, then they're actually rare objects and it's fine. But if your artist's print is 100% identical except for that "#3 of 100" signature, I wouldn't pay one more cent for the privilege of owning that signature. Same with autographs on books or CD/vinyl covers. Picasso and Hendrix were interesting people and artists, but there is nothing particularly interesting about their signatures and they don't improve the painting or CD in any way *. Paying hundreds of dollars for a perfectly ordinary book that some sweaty fan brought to an exhausted author at an event to have him quickly scribble "John Q. Author" on it is, in my opinion, exactly as pointless as paying hundreds of dollars for a NFT of that book. * Some trivial exceptions: if a painting's author is disputed, the signature can help solve the dispute. And some artists do have interesting signatures (e.g. Dali). For the vast majority of 'limited prints' neither consideration applies.

namaria 4y ago
Funny you should mention Dali, as he famously sold blank sheets of paper with his signature.
- piaste 4y ago
  Indeed, Dalí would absolutely be minting NFTs if he were alive today. And this is one of the most unkind things I might have ever said about NFTs.

mr_gibbins 4y ago

I'm not an artist and I don't understand art, beyond liking something tangible with an aesthetic that appeals to me. So I'll buy prints, or originals, that I like, and that I don't mind looking at every day, and hang them on my wall. I have no objection paying a reasonable price for them either - artists have to eat. The issue I have with NFTs is that they are not art. They are just vessels signifying financial worth. The worth of a painting, a print to me is aesthetic, not financial. But there is no aesthetic worth in an NFT. I can't hang it on my wall. I can't enjoy it every day. So if we treat NFTs as tokens of value without any artistic worth, they become no more than a variant of another cryptocoin, albeit a 'unique' coin worth $XXX, and by decoupling the artistic argument from the financial argument, all the 'silliness' goes away. It's simply a store of value.