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The banana stuck to the wall isn't as dumb as it sounds. Look up the story behind it. I read an argument that it's a clever bit of satire on NFTs and the idea o

The banana stuck to the wall isn't as dumb as it sounds. Look up the story behind it. I read an argument that it's a clever bit of satire on NFTs and the idea of "owning a piece of art". Does that make it art? Dunno. Don't care. It makes it interesting which is a more useful category.

wongarsu 1y ago
It is a physical version of the insanity that are NFT pictures. It is a piece of art that is perfectly fungible. Anyone can stick a banana on the wall. And in fact the exhibits of this piece of art are a banana taped to the wall by some random employee. The only thing making it unique is a certificate by the artist that assures you that a banana taped to the wall in that specific exhibition is an art piece by the artist. Just like NFTs are fungible jpegs presumably made non-fungible by a blockchain entry. I think it's brilliant commentary. And even if you have never heard of NFTs it poses questions about what qualifies a piece of art as unique or an original
- dingnuts 1y ago
  an NFT is a record of ownership. if you have no enforcement mechanism it's meaningless, but nobody makes jokes about fungible data files when we're talking about copyright. if you tied an NFT hash to a legal contract then you could actually enforce ownership of those fungible jpegs and the right click copy people would be just as in violation of the law as someone who walks out with your employer's software sources and jpegs don't actually have anything to do with NFTs other than being used as representations of them by grifters, ruining a useful technology by poisoning the representation of it in minds like yours because a distributed record of software ownership would threaten the app store monopolies. ok that's conspiratorial but it would explain it..
  - Retr0id 1y ago
    If NFTs only become useful when tied to a regular legal contract, why not just use a regular legal contract?
    - TeMPOraL 1y ago
      Because despite some popular opinions to the contrary, the blockchain/crypto part isn't replacing the legal layer; it's just implementing a way of tracking things that's less reliant on trust than the usual way of doing it.
      - immibis 1y ago
        Apparently it's not uncommon that when a debt collector buys a spreadsheet of unpaid debt, they can't actually prove in court that the debtor actually owes them the debt. You'd think some form of cryptocurrency technology would improve this - the legal contract would say you'd pay to a certain smart contract address until the smart contract says you paid enough (the legal contract would also have to specify how this is calculated as it would take precedence over the smart contract in case of a dispute); the smart contract would implement an NFT where the holder of the NFT receives the debt payments. Alternatively, it implements an NFT and holds a payee address (physical address, business name) and whoever has the NFT can update the payee address and whoever that's set to is the current creditor. Of course, we probably don't want the dystopic parts of society to get more reliable, but the fact is the tech would probably make them so.
        TeMPOraL 1y ago
        > Of course, we probably don't want the dystopic parts of society to get more reliable, but the fact is the tech would probably make them so. I strongly agree, and thank you for spelling it out. It's a point often lost in discussions of both tech and economics, that we need some slack in the system. That's where happiness, love, friendship, compassion, charity, forgiveness, imagination, and all other things good, nice and human, live. Too much efficiency just grinds people to dust. (That, and creates brittle systems that breaks the first moment reality asserts itself.) > Apparently it's not uncommon that when a debt collector buys a spreadsheet of unpaid debt, they can't actually prove in court that the debtor actually owes them the debt. You'd think some form of cryptocurrency technology would improve this At a glance, I think your idea would work. I'm just curious about corner cases alone, and how often they'd happen. For example, in some cases, I imagine it would actually reveal there is no proof because the debt is bogus. My impression is, no one in the chain is really incentivized to verify whether the debt is legitimate. Creditors outsource that in bulk to collection agencies, agencies might find it easier to try and collect anyway than proactively validate every entry in the spreadsheet, and plenty of debtors will contest real debts anyway. For the first two, the name of the game is minimizing costs; not sure if adding crypto to the mix would help, or just make the process more complicated and expensive. I also wonder what would happen if, for some reason, a smart contract/NFT was established around a bogus entry. How much harder would it be for the debtor to prove that they don't actually owe the money in question?
  - DanHulton 1y ago
    > and the right click copy people would be just as in violation of the law What are you EVEN talking about. If you transmit an image to my computer when I browse your website, that image is now saved on my computer in my browser's cache. It is too late for your supposed legal contact at this point, I have already copied your image, at your explicit instruction. Now try to run that through court. "Your honor, I instructed the defendant's machine to save a copy of my image on his computer, which it did, causing the defendant to have copied my image, thus violating this here legal contract written on a slice of American cheese." You can already make legal contracts about the use and re-use of art. NFTS, as a method for trying to prevent people from performing actions the internet explicitly requires for them to even be seen in the first place, were, are, and will remain nonsense.
    - carpo 1y ago
      He's talking about provenance. The NFT just proves who the actual owner is, so when people were right-click downloading and saying "I own this now" you can very easily prove that they don't actually own it, the holder of the NFT does.
      - matkoniecz 1y ago
        > The NFT just proves who the actual owner is no it does not, as anyone may create a new NFT attached to the same content with different claims
  - LocalH 1y ago
    > if you tied an NFT hash to a legal contract then you could actually enforce ownership of those fungible jpegs and the right click copy people would be just as in violation of the law as someone who walks out with your employer's software sources For NFTs "owned" by people in the US, I sure hope you have each and every NTF as a formally registered copyright. IANAL, but it would seem the contract cannot directly affect non-parties, and thus standard copyright law would apply. Registration is required to file a copyright infringement suit.
rcxdude 1y ago
It's interesting but it's not super original. Dadaism already basically ran through most of the variations on this kind of concept many years ago.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- andybak 1y ago
  Yes and that argument can be made for a lot of conceptual art since. But that's not the argument the "hurr... it's a banana. stuck to a wall" crowd are really making.
  - rcxdude 1y ago
    I know, and in that sense maybe it's still valuable, or maybe it's just not really interesting ("Average person thinks niche concept kinda dumb, news at 11").
frereubu 1y ago
Perhaps. But there's also an enormous amount of dirty money sloshing around the art world that I would argue has more to do with the price than the interest of the work itself.

wongarsu 1y ago

It is a physical version of the insanity that are NFT pictures. It is a piece of art that is perfectly fungible. Anyone can stick a banana on the wall. And in fact the exhibits of this piece of art are a banana taped to the wall by some random employee. The only thing making it unique is a certificate by the artist that assures you that a banana taped to the wall in that specific exhibition is an art piece by the artist. Just like NFTs are fungible jpegs presumably made non-fungible by a blockchain entry. I think it's brilliant commentary. And even if you have never heard of NFTs it poses questions about what qualifies a piece of art as unique or an original

dingnuts 1y ago
an NFT is a record of ownership. if you have no enforcement mechanism it's meaningless, but nobody makes jokes about fungible data files when we're talking about copyright. if you tied an NFT hash to a legal contract then you could actually enforce ownership of those fungible jpegs and the right click copy people would be just as in violation of the law as someone who walks out with your employer's software sources and jpegs don't actually have anything to do with NFTs other than being used as representations of them by grifters, ruining a useful technology by poisoning the representation of it in minds like yours because a distributed record of software ownership would threaten the app store monopolies. ok that's conspiratorial but it would explain it..
- Retr0id 1y ago
  If NFTs only become useful when tied to a regular legal contract, why not just use a regular legal contract?
  - TeMPOraL 1y ago
    Because despite some popular opinions to the contrary, the blockchain/crypto part isn't replacing the legal layer; it's just implementing a way of tracking things that's less reliant on trust than the usual way of doing it.
    - immibis 1y ago
      Apparently it's not uncommon that when a debt collector buys a spreadsheet of unpaid debt, they can't actually prove in court that the debtor actually owes them the debt. You'd think some form of cryptocurrency technology would improve this - the legal contract would say you'd pay to a certain smart contract address until the smart contract says you paid enough (the legal contract would also have to specify how this is calculated as it would take precedence over the smart contract in case of a dispute); the smart contract would implement an NFT where the holder of the NFT receives the debt payments. Alternatively, it implements an NFT and holds a payee address (physical address, business name) and whoever has the NFT can update the payee address and whoever that's set to is the current creditor. Of course, we probably don't want the dystopic parts of society to get more reliable, but the fact is the tech would probably make them so.
      - TeMPOraL 1y ago
        > Of course, we probably don't want the dystopic parts of society to get more reliable, but the fact is the tech would probably make them so. I strongly agree, and thank you for spelling it out. It's a point often lost in discussions of both tech and economics, that we need some slack in the system. That's where happiness, love, friendship, compassion, charity, forgiveness, imagination, and all other things good, nice and human, live. Too much efficiency just grinds people to dust. (That, and creates brittle systems that breaks the first moment reality asserts itself.) > Apparently it's not uncommon that when a debt collector buys a spreadsheet of unpaid debt, they can't actually prove in court that the debtor actually owes them the debt. You'd think some form of cryptocurrency technology would improve this At a glance, I think your idea would work. I'm just curious about corner cases alone, and how often they'd happen. For example, in some cases, I imagine it would actually reveal there is no proof because the debt is bogus. My impression is, no one in the chain is really incentivized to verify whether the debt is legitimate. Creditors outsource that in bulk to collection agencies, agencies might find it easier to try and collect anyway than proactively validate every entry in the spreadsheet, and plenty of debtors will contest real debts anyway. For the first two, the name of the game is minimizing costs; not sure if adding crypto to the mix would help, or just make the process more complicated and expensive. I also wonder what would happen if, for some reason, a smart contract/NFT was established around a bogus entry. How much harder would it be for the debtor to prove that they don't actually owe the money in question?
- DanHulton 1y ago
  > and the right click copy people would be just as in violation of the law What are you EVEN talking about. If you transmit an image to my computer when I browse your website, that image is now saved on my computer in my browser's cache. It is too late for your supposed legal contact at this point, I have already copied your image, at your explicit instruction. Now try to run that through court. "Your honor, I instructed the defendant's machine to save a copy of my image on his computer, which it did, causing the defendant to have copied my image, thus violating this here legal contract written on a slice of American cheese." You can already make legal contracts about the use and re-use of art. NFTS, as a method for trying to prevent people from performing actions the internet explicitly requires for them to even be seen in the first place, were, are, and will remain nonsense.
  - carpo 1y ago
    He's talking about provenance. The NFT just proves who the actual owner is, so when people were right-click downloading and saying "I own this now" you can very easily prove that they don't actually own it, the holder of the NFT does.
    - matkoniecz 1y ago
      > The NFT just proves who the actual owner is no it does not, as anyone may create a new NFT attached to the same content with different claims
- LocalH 1y ago
  > if you tied an NFT hash to a legal contract then you could actually enforce ownership of those fungible jpegs and the right click copy people would be just as in violation of the law as someone who walks out with your employer's software sources For NFTs "owned" by people in the US, I sure hope you have each and every NTF as a formally registered copyright. IANAL, but it would seem the contract cannot directly affect non-parties, and thus standard copyright law would apply. Registration is required to file a copyright infringement suit.

rcxdude 1y ago

It's interesting but it's not super original. Dadaism already basically ran through most of the variations on this kind of concept many years ago.

deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
andybak 1y ago
Yes and that argument can be made for a lot of conceptual art since. But that's not the argument the "hurr... it's a banana. stuck to a wall" crowd are really making.
- rcxdude 1y ago
  I know, and in that sense maybe it's still valuable, or maybe it's just not really interesting ("Average person thinks niche concept kinda dumb, news at 11").

frereubu 1y ago

Perhaps. But there's also an enormous amount of dirty money sloshing around the art world that I would argue has more to do with the price than the interest of the work itself.