Buddy, think about the poor starving VCs. They got into certain coins at prices at fraction of a dollar. They need 10000x returns so they can keep putting 100m into a saas company that sales force can buy.

In the current system when an artist creates something and sells it, they typically get paid once, often lowballed. The buyer may turn around and sell it for 100x. The buyer made far more than the artist, who gets nothing in this scenario.

With NFTs the artist can get a cut of every transfer indefinitely.

>> "I'd be curious to know what fraction of NFT enthusiasts had previously commissioned a piece of art, and of those how many were truly aghast at the dire state of payment systems without NFTs or at their inability to assert ownership via a blockchain. I suspect both are quite small."

The main complaint I hear from actual commission-taking artists is that even something fun and innocuous but potentially readable as suggesting banned uses, like "fuck yeah," in the comment field on the paying side will make PayPal suspend your account. The artists I know are universally opposed to NFTs with more artists I know of coming out against every time a new NFT site launches with stolen art.

Yeah; the distributed ledger thing was always a funny value prop to me because it was like…so, replace what we already do today and are responsible for the accuracy of due to many various laws with…something orders of magnitude slower, orders of magnitude more complex, that requires orders of magnitude more compute power so we can…expose all transaction records to everyone involved?

Also, re: art, kinda agree: the current gallery system takes a huge cut of sale prices and a lot of galleries don’t do much to help artists. The real winners, though, are the landlords.

We’ve purchased art with checks before, and even in the “mid-range” price segment, logistics are much more of a problem than counterfeit risk. The logistical part still needs a good solution. Putting a large piece on a palette and trying to get a shipping company to treat it like the delicate and irreplaceable piece it is is tough and/or very expensive. Putting a canvas in the mail is a huge risk. Discovery is another big problem, as many people who might buy art don’t even know how to do so. It’s not like you just scan a QR code and enter your credit card details. A lot of it today is a very personal high-touch sales process that doesn’t always add value (much like cars, but sometimes with zero sleaze if you’re dealing with the actual artist directly). Once you get to the broker model and “if you have to ask” pricing it’s even more opaque and in more need of a solution that isn’t just auctions, but NFTs aren’t the solution.

It was never a solved problem, it was an addressed problem. And the method of address poorly allocated credit.

Maintaining records for art transactions, and thus enacting a fee structure that would benefit the artist when art is traded, traditionally meant introducing a middleman - and the associated overheads are why "fine arts" are known as a gatekept world and commissions have become the default for digital art. A sneer like "yeah well did you commission art before NFTs" is tautological. Commissions are the business model because they're available with minimal financial technology, not because they're ideal for society. The result you want is "more art is produced and more artists can afford to produce at a high level". But not everyone is interested in commissioning a large quantity of art of their furry OC getting porked. And likewise, people have trouble commissioning an artist to work freely without adding some kind of externalized upside like "build my own personal brand". There's a saturation point to that business model in and of itself.

It's only been relatively recently that artists also started to be able to access intellectual property law as a business model, but running an IP business involves a perpetual defense of property through legal enforcements, since we are in the age of mechanical reproduction. So it also has barriers to entry and ongoing overheads. I don't hear anyone saying that game developers should all work on commission, though.

The proposition of NFT art is just a revision of the gallery system - make intellectual work an asset, but on a much broader scale. The fee structure is automated, and the art itself is open to viewing and therefore doesn't need the same degree of IP enforcement as a paywall model; the only provenance question is the initial one of whether you actually minted your own work. And naturally, among the first people to have jumped on this are charlatans who have tested that exact question of initial provenance.

But I can say, having closely observed and participated a little, that NFT art on the whole is not uniquely bad or good, it's still "just" an art market, just one geared towards the artist who is interested in making their brand a speculative investment. And that is another way to get art made.