Anyone strongly against NFTs within our creative industry? Interested to hear some views on whether you think they are good or bad.
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- @Emma Thomson Hi Emma, I think you can mint and buy NFTs on a number of different currencies - Etherium is just the most popular. There are many alternatives. I get your reasons for being put off though.
- When I first heard about them I thought they were a good idea because it would be a good way for digital artists to sell their work. I also thought that it would help digital art as a medium be taken more seriously as in some areas traditional art is viewed as superior to digital art.However, I’ve since decided that they’re actually quite a bad idea. One reason for this is because they’re bad for the environment due to the fact that they can only be bought with Ethereum, a cryptocurrency which is very energy intensive. Another reason for this is that people have started using NFT’s not unlike some people use fashion from luxury and designer brands - as a way to show off how much money they have. The other problem with this is that people are reportedly repeatedly selling themselves their own NFTs at highly inflated prices to artificially drive up the prices of their work, so called ‘wash trading’. I think this is just wrong because this sort of makes the idea of art as a form of self-expression, or a means of decoration, irrelevant - they’re essentially putting profit over the purpose or meaning of their art
- It's al based on speculation and you own a link of a picture or whatever hosted on a server. It's not decentralized.
- Recently watched a brilliant video highlighting the often overlooked downsides of NFTs. The video is 2 hours long but well worth the watch, clearly heavily researched and formulates the ideas much better than I ever could.Link to check it out: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YQ_xWvX1n9g
- I have been reseaching NFTs as a part of my curatorial practice. There's a lot of hype around them and most people's reaction to them is driven by that media hype - however the parts that are newsworthy are the more sensationalised aspects - the loonie fringes, which do not reflect what is really happening.It's very much in its early stages and may offer some interesting developments in terms of dissemnination of digital artwork, decentralised financial systems (ownership of your data), a platform to sell or develop funding for digital artwork that do not fit the current physical gallery wall or floor system.In terms of the enviromental issues - this boils down to the method for creating blockchains. Most require a lot of computational work and therefor require a lot of energt. This possibly isn't the place to go into it, however there is an arguably clean (enviromentally) crypto called Tezos which uses a different method to create blockchains. Built around this are a number of platforms that allow you to mint NFTs using this crypto blockchain and they are much more in favour of creating an art based community with less of a focus on fast money.To write them off is folly and I will be publishging a deep dive analysis in the next few weeks to help shed some light on alteratives and why you might consider them.
- Hello Jason,Apart from the environmental downsides NFTs gave platform for digital artists. If you think about before NFTs people had money in a digital form, they watches films in digital form etc but somehow when it came to an artwork people always expected a piece of canvas or so. Just as an example there were no way that Christies would have taken a digital artwork seriously. So it gave a much needed transformation for the art world.However at the moment it's a bit all over the place and doesn't work well but I would deifinitely gave it some years, maybe a decade to really be what it should be.
- it's a ponzi.
- NFTs, and crypto in general, derive value solely on the idea that someone else is stupid enough to pay you more than what you paid. There's no actual value in any crypto until someone comes along to pay more for it. There's a reason only rich people are getting into crypto and NFTs - and if it was a revolutionary system, rich people wouldn't be telling anyone about it.It's a grift. And once you're in you're forced to shill for the concept constantly because if you don't, you won't convince someone to pay you for you to get out of the game.That's without mentioning the enormous ecological disaster crypto has already implemented - and continues to contribute to. Crypto-nerds are starting to talk about carbon offsetting as a way to be "carbon neutral" but that, too, is just part of the bullshit. Like me punching you in the face then saying sorry afterwards, the damage is already done, but I'll feel less guilty about it.It's all shit - always has been. And as much as crypto-idiots will maintain that people just "don't get it," we all do. We really do.
- @Jason Measures there is a lot of different ways to create money for charity, i much prefer fundraising through donations or those events that you do a really long hike or a bike ride. Minimal harm for the environment.Why destroy the planet even more (when we’re already in climate crisis) just to raise money for a good cause? Also charity is often used to write off some tax, soo… adding NFTs to that makes it super dodgy.
- @Olga Ollie Bartolowicz I agree… it feels like some kind of money laundering. What if the NFT you are creating is used to generate money for a charity- how would you feel then?
- I’ve seen too many artists get their work stolen and sold for thousands of dollars without them knowing.Also it’s super bad for the envriontment and the whole idea is just a scam - why pay so much money not even for a jpeg, but for a code that says this file is yours? Why not just commission the artist and get a physical, original artwork?
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