NFTs (thread now extremely NSFW)

NFTs in gaming are horse armor and that shit sucked then

as much as I think Hirst is a fraud and a huckster, his scheme of having people pay the same amount for either a physical piece of art or an NFT linked to a digital image was at least an interesting experiment. too bad the art sucked.

ha this reminds me of when I went to an electronic poetry exhibit, and some well-known LANGUAGE poets were in the audience (Charles Bernstein, Bob Perelman.) I'm pretty sure it was Bernstein who said something like, "There experiments are really interesting. I wonder what they'd be like if the poetry was any good. Or maybe it can't be good for the effect to work."

I watched all two hours of that Canadian guy’s video and the big takeaway for me is that NFT’s exist to get you to buy Cryptocurrency, to keep “the line” on that grift going upupUP!!!

yeah the not-very-well-kept secret of crypto is that it's not zero-sum, it's massively negative-sum

one interesting thing I learned from that video is that once your NFT wallet address is known people can dump all sorts of fake NFTs in there, including ones that are pretty much exact copies of NFTs you own, except they direct to some malware that will steal everything in your wallet

the vid does go into this a few times but the fact that there's no way to reverse transactions or really counter fraud at all is so remarkably shitty and Reason #1 why this stuff will never be "currency" in any real sense of the word. it literally works the way I imagined banks did when I was 9, where if you forgot your account number you couldn't access your money, and if the bank got robbed then everyone just lost everything. no regular person is ever gonna want to buy into a system like that!

also when you withdraw money from your bank half the time they give you counterfeit bills and if you try to complain they say "sucks to be you, dude!"

We've been talking a lot about this in the poet group chat, there's some stuff about NFTs and art over at Caesura that's pretty interesting

https://caesuramag.org/posts/caesura-roundtable-nft

crypto, bitcoin, the blockchain, NFTs, web3...

welcome to the Scam Economyhttps://t.co/adHAVnROAn

episode 1 drops tonight @ 9pm EThttps://t.co/pCw8hKtbDK pic.twitter.com/vOMnkuHhZV

— Matt Binder (@MattBinder) January 27, 2022

After the NFT Takeover of Art Basel Miami Beach 2021

It has been a very long time since anything that felt genuinely new happened in the art world. Twenty years into the 21st century, we are still chasing the tail of the past one in a hodgepodge of relational aesthetics, new media, and installation passing for art of the present. Finally, an odd contender for genuine novelty has emerged not from within art, but within the emergent cryptocurrency market: the non-fungible token, or NFT. But the tokens’ apparent novelty has proved disorienting for an art world not as well versed in blockchain/crypto tech as it believes itself to be and desperate to call any slight reconfiguration a utopian opportunity (just as it did with relational aesthetics).

The lessons of the past have not been learned. Just fifteen years ago, we were all in a flurry about the democratizing potential of social media, especially after the Arab Spring, the liberatory trajectory of Second Life, and the liberating decentralization of post-Fordism/late neoliberalism, only to be embarrassed upon the discovery that populism does not lead to utopia, Second Life was a dud, and post-Fordism is largely responsible for current supply chain issues. Oops. But here we are again, titillated by blockchain, alternatives to museums and traditional galleries, Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs), the post-human metaverse.

NFTs on their own are boring. They are digital ledger lines on the blockchain designating ownership. They are not a new medium. In fact, their connection to the JPEGs and GIFs whose sale and transfer they enable is a tenuous one: the code itself contains no metadata. They’re a tool, not a revolution, and they aren’t a utopian art project; they’re the technology that allows the sale and purchase of immaterial commodities, a precondition for any possible success of the metaverse.

For digital art, which emerged decades ago from the tradition of postmodern new media art, NFTs represent a solution to a longstanding problem: the difficulty of selling and displaying a GIF as one would a painting. Its proponents insist that it is a critical intervention as an immanent critique in the full proliferation of digital existence, but how critical is it when it requires its viewers to create digital wallets and jump on the crypto wagon? This sector too often appears naive about reality.

For cryptocurrency investors and tech workers, they represent financial opportunities and the ground on which to create an art world all of their own. They are deeply naive about art and often disarmingly sincere in their excitement about it. The pervasive infantile aesthetic preferred by this group is a reflection of its emergent character. Is there any potential in this new art market, which seems poised to edge out the old as it is integrated into art fairs, galleries, and auction houses? Is capital, even in its present decrepit form, more progressive than art theory?

We take the NFT phenomenon not as a technological one with technical problems and technical answers, and even less so as a potential embodied in the software it uses. Blockchain may be decentralized, but Sotheby’s and Christie’s, where NFT stars like Beeple have been taking their work direct to market, certainly are not. Art-for-NFT may eschew elite curation from MFAs and PhDs but relies instead on other hierarchies that have more to do with celebrity and straightforward access to money than visual quality, let alone conceptual positioning. It has already proven itself not to be the very thing its digital art proponents hoped it would be: an equitable market (as if such a thing exists) cleared of undesirable barriers. To the contrary, the majority of transactions are concentrated in the top 10% of market actors and the average artist has nearly no shot at making a buck let alone an impact by minting an NFT and posting their work on OpenSea, the most popular NFT marketplace.

The NFT phenomenon is a social, not technological, phenomenon emerging from the new money of the 21st century — the tech sector — working out its own culture and aesthetic tastes as an alternative to the self-critical or self-defeating aesthetic culture that has been dominant since the emergence of liberal society in the 19th century. If there is any potential in this trend it is there, not in lines of code. Perhaps it is better to be naive about art than about reality.

https://caesuramag.org/posts/caesura-roundtable-nft

I work at a pretty big art museum. Our contemporary art curator has the worst fucking judgement and the running joke is that when she goes to visit an artist's studio she will find something awful in the back of the closet to buy because we often have terrible works by great artists. She has a good academic grounding and understands historical import but no sense of what LOOKS good, in terms of individual artworks or how to install them. We live in fear of her "discovering" NFTs. Let's call her Mary.

I was installing in a gallery with a much younger, bitchy (in a good way) curator and another art handler who is big on NFTs. He was going on about them and I said "You haven't told Mary about NFTs, have you?"

Bitchy young curator: "Oh PLEASE. Nobody's told Mary about PDFs yet."

Meanwhile, the BoredApe crew is ready to cash in with their own currency. Watching all of this unfold in real time is kind of amazing. The fleecing right before your eyes.

Source close $APE coin developers were able to confirm the following:

1) definitely coming Q1

2) IT WILL BE GENEROUS

Grateful for the creators @BoredApeYC
🦍👨‍🚀🚀

— NFT-PAPI 🍌 (@NFT_Papi_) January 20, 2022

lol

Been a long time lurker supporting APE products, and just not able to "Flip" my way up into the kind of numbers BAYC extended into on SUUUUCH a Short Notice.

Would love to see some benefits "Trickle Down" to the rest of the Ecosystem users who helped build the brand.

— ChangeTheGame.eth 🦇🔊 (@GametheChange) January 20, 2022

Lmao

enjoy your supreme brick

hey that two-hour video was good

This is not important for the thread obviously, but this bit from that Caesura piece was disqualifying for me:

The lessons of the past have not been learned. Just fifteen years ago, we were all in a flurry about the democratizing potential of social media, especially after the Arab Spring, the liberatory trajectory of Second Life, and the liberating decentralization of post-Fordism/late neoliberalism, only to be embarrassed upon the discovery that populism does not lead to utopia, Second Life was a dud, and post-Fordism is largely responsible for current supply chain issues.

To be nitpicky, the Arab Spring began in 2010, Second Life in 2003, post-Fordism in the 1970s (or earlier depending who you ask), and "late neoliberalism"...well I'm not sure what that is trying to refer to, but if your main problem with post-Fordism is "current supply chain issues" you are a sociopath.

This is also nonsense:

The NFT phenomenon is a social, not technological, phenomenon emerging from the new money of the 21st century — the tech sector — working out its own culture and aesthetic tastes as an alternative to the self-critical or self-defeating aesthetic culture that has been dominant since the emergence of liberal society in the 19th century.

There are some solid points in the rest, but idk

I finally looked up the etherium NFT standard today. Turns out you don't even have to include an URL or a description.

"We remind implementation authors that the empty string is a valid response to name and symbol if you protest to the usage of this mechanism. We also remind everyone that any smart contract can use the same name and symbol as your contract. How a client may determine which ERC-721 smart contracts are well-known (canonical) is outside the scope of this standard."

That last sentence means, I think, that how you know the NFT is the One Official NFT is not in the standard.

correction: they do need to include an URI, which as of this year is always an URL.

xp rob

second quote definitely is nonsense, ha. first quote, remember they're writing about the relationship between decentralization and digital art, not about the history of presidential administrations.

Yeah, I don't totally buy everything from that Rojas piece, but I thought it was pretty interesting.

the history of presidential administrations

?

not sure if you're kidding—sincere apologies if so!—but Fordism refers to Henry Ford (and his method of organizing production) not Gerald

it is me who is not loling now, i'm a fool! i should do more than skim, sorry.

sometimes when i log into ilx in the morning and see 20 bookmarks, i don't give it my all, sad lol

Plz prioritize NFT thread, thx.

haha no problem Karl, honestly it was a bit tryhard grad student of me to post that anyway

Anyone wanna buy my NFT of this sign?

https://cdn.theatlantic.com/assets/media/img/posts/9777235064_8c0259fc59_c.jpg

What Is $OBEY?
The Obey Giant project has always played with and explored concepts around consumerism, capitalism and value – both the value we place on things and the value placed upon things by others. Street Art at its very core balances experiences and objects... 1/

— Shepard Fairey (@OBEYGIANT) January 28, 2022

What can you do with $OBEY?
Initially, holding $OBEY tokens will grant you access to gated sections of the Obey Discord which will be the primary place where future usages will be announced. 5/

— Shepard Fairey (@OBEYGIANT) January 28, 2022

Burn down the Amazon to get a better Patreon tier on the Discord to find out more tokens you can buy to get to the next tier!

Reading about/trying to understand NFTs feels to me like trying to understand this

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2ydd9Z4p8mM

i've almost finished watching the "Line Go Up" video posted upthread. it's a very thorough, well-reasoned takedown. i'd like to see someone attempt a rebuttal, might look for one when i get through the rest of the video.

Idk if the community (if there even is one) would have the wherewithal to make a reasoned counter-argument for NFT.

The closest thing you might find is this guy, who is the equivalent of Elon Musk, but in crypto, explaining why he *doesn't* think they're worthwhile.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tK5aDgopt9o

The Troemel NFT Report is worth watching, I think.

where do crypto heads hang out online?

discord

invest early to gain access to special discord invite-only channels, where you can figure out what your crypto will do

It seems to be more on Telegram for some reason.

https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/seneca-bored-ape-yacht-club-digital-art-nfts-1280341/

lol NFT equity loans.

the economy is absolutely fucked pic.twitter.com/OAxyZ3Aoq3

— posting eternally 🧊 (@postingwhilegay) January 28, 2022

fortune favors the brave god loves a fool

you just know they're gonna use that loan to buy more nfts

the most depressing part about celebrities buying these things is when they pretend they actually like the art

The art really might be mindblowing to Jimmy Fallon.

the most depressing part about celebrities buying these things is when they pretend they actually like the art

they're being paid to

Yeah I just assumed the celebrities shilling NFTs were being paid to.

"just LOOK at this badly drawn cartoon monkey"

https://i.imgur.com/88qe8TZ.jpg

finally decided to mute "NFT" on Twitter, looking forward to living a nice, quiet life of simplicity and contemplation, kind of like a modern day Thoreau

But what if the National Film Theatre announces their summer season?

If you could own color on the blockchain—and earn royalties from it each time an NFT that uses those colors trades, which colors would you mint? This is what we're going to make possible at the upcoming @colordotmuseum NFT market.

— Omar Farooq (@curator1of1) January 29, 2022

Buy the sky and sell the sky and bleed the sky and tell the sky

"Who owns the color blue?"

A question a child might ask, but not a childish question...