(I’m mostly on the side of enthusiasts of the tech looking in on the art world from the outside… minted a few things but not an artist)
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This brewing art-culture war is weirdly underground. I haven’t witnessed direct confrontations between pro/anti NFT artists. Only indirect sniping and passive aggressive muttering.
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Maybe artists don’t fight directly. Or maybe they don’t want to publicly acknowledge that lowly techbros have accidentally divided them. Pretty sure nobody working on the tech side anticipated this fallout.
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“Overwhelming disapproval” sounds too strong an assessment. I suspect it’s a vocal minority on both sides with the silent majority still undecided.
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Replying to @vgr @NeuralBricolage and 2 others
Overwhelming disapproval drowns out much if not all of pro-NFT artists. Most proficient artists seem to be mid-thirties now and NFT are just against the natural world order. Nearly all have found art stolen in the NFT space and marketplaces not caring enough.
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Seems like there ought to be a precedent in photography. Some galleries allow or encourage photography, others prohibit it. Same with artists exhibiting at art fairs. For obvious reasons those making 2d paintings are more sensitive than sculptors etc.
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Hmm. Need a general theory of crypto-native crime, not counting hacking, which is an external kind of crime. Two genres so far:
1. Ransomware
2. Minting NFTs from IP you have no rights to
Any others?
Both rely on encryption to attack, rather than stealing decryption keys
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Running a poll
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Poll: If you’re a serious working artist (ie making art is the main focus of your time/attention even if it’s not how you make a living), what’s your stance on NFTs?
Show this poll
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This divide seems art specific. Other NFT genres like gaming seem to be much more practical about it. NFTs are interesting for games if the fees are low enough, otherwise not. Done. NFTs are interesting as personalized access control fobs if set up properly, otherwise not. Done.
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Because you’re capturing or diluting value that morally ought to go to the creator of the thing being pointed to. It’s the same argument news sites have against Google or Facebook re capturing ad revenue via links, but much stronger.
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Replying to @vgr
minting a token just contains a url, right? why would it be a crime to tokenize a url?
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When Google makes money off a search ad before sending a visitor to a site, it is largely taking a slice out of new attention it enabled, though it does cannibalize old attention too. In the best case, there’s win-win net growth. In the worst case it is parasitism.
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But someone who NFTs work they don’t own, unlike a search engine or social network adding discovery leverage to content they don’t own, is taking a slice of existing pie without growing it at all, let alone enough to get to non-zero-sum. It’s pretty pure theft.


