NFTs: A Commentary on Art and Careless Spending

"Non-Fungible Tokens" is a phrase I have been hearing a lot lately, like a broken record repeating the same words over and over again for a week. It's been driving me absolutely crazy! What drives me even crazier is what exactly the NFT craze is about.

Forbes Advisor defines an NFT as "a digital asset that represents real-world objects like art, music, in-game items, and videos." In other words it is a digital version of what can easily--and physically, might I add--be accessed in the real world. Yet people will pay insane amounts of money for these literally untouchable pieces, with prices for these things going so far in the millions. Just why exactly an NFT is so expensive, or even has a price tag to begin with, escapes me.

"Technically, they are worth something," writes Nick Tournie, "but that value is only based on the niche audiences that are willing to pay a lot of money for them, and there are plenty of people who are willing to pay outrageous prices for the rights to data that links to a .gif or .jpg." In other words the NFT marketplace is reserved for those who are beyond financially stable, and able to pay absurd prices not only to show ownership of a digital piece, but to also show off the money they can spend frivolously.

I mean, I understand that many of these online works are visually appealing and thought-provoking, such as the Bored Ape collection, for instance, but is it really worth paying all that money for something one can easily screenshot on practically any cellular device then share it with others or save it as a home-screen? A simple Google image search of any given NFT (but let's refer back to the Bored Ape, for a moment) will show what I mean.

Let's not forget to mention that, as a relatively new platform in the world of art, there are no set standards to regulate who can sell what, or whether a work is or isn't being sold directly by its creator.

Tournie continues, "Speaking as someone who has had their art stolen and then minted as an NFT by some random cryptobro, TWICE...It is so easy to steal something and mint it as an NFT...There is zero accountability because the legality of NFTs is still so undefined. Do we really own it? I don't know. Can someone own something that only exists in the digital space? How do we even define ownership?

"If you buy a painting, you own the physical painting, but do you own the art? ...I don't even know if I own my own work anymore. It's all online, so you can download it for free, you can stream my music on Spotify and I'll get paid $0.003 per listen. I don't even know who the real thieves are anymore."

Art does give one certain liberties in terms of expression and creativity, and in today's day and age, it is very easy to share one's work on multiple platforms like social media. That being said, the same methods people use to capture online images of physical artwork could theoretically apply to digital artwork. In this sense, art cannot solely be owned by one individual if the rest of the world has access to it in one form or another. Thus, if art belongs to the world, then its financial aspect is meaningless in the long run.

Of course this does not invalidate the monetary transaction in which one acquires a genuine piece, be it an NFT or a painted canvas, but nothing would stop prying eyes from duplicating the work in some way. An NFT, like anything in momentary popularity, will eventually be lost in the wave of imitation until its trendy nature and value has been exhausted to such an extent that its real worth would never seem to have existed.

References: https://www.forbes.com/advisor/investing/nft-non-fungible-token/#:~:text=An%20NFT%2 0is%20a%20digital,underlying%20software%20as%20many%20cryptos (Links to an external site.) Nick Tournie - Printing Production / Advertising, Harvest International