On 18 Mar 2021, at 13:21, I wrote:
Felix, what you're talking about looks theoretical, but at root these
are really just questions of provenance, which the art world knows
about only too well.
Lo and behold:
<
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/04/nfts-werent-supposed-end-like/618488/
>
The only thing we’d wanted to do was ensure that artists
could make some money and have control over their work. Back
in May 2014, I was paired up with the artist Kevin McCoy at
Seven on Seven, an annual event in New York City designed to
spark new ideas by connecting technologists and artists. I
wasn’t sure which one I was supposed to be; McCoy and his
wife, Jennifer, were already renowned for their
collaborative digital art, and he was better at coding than
I was.
At the time, I was working as a consultant to auction houses
and media companies—a role that had me obsessively thinking
about the provenance, ownership, distribution, and control
of artworks. Seven on Seven was modeled after tech-industry
hackathons, in which people stay up all night to create a
working prototype that they then show to an audience. This
was around the peak of Tumblr culture, when a raucous,
wildly inspiring community of millions of artists and fans
was sharing images and videos completely devoid of
attribution, compensation, or context. As it turned out,
some of the McCoys’ works were among those being widely
“reblogged” by Tumblr users. And Kevin had been thinking a
lot about the potential of the then-nascent
blockchain—essentially an indelible ledger of digital
transactions—to offer artists a way to support and protect
their creations.
See also:
https://www.wired.com/1997/05/site-aims-to-be-applets-r-us-of-web/
The NFT bubble doesn't have enough substance or specificity to support
much theory. If you knocked some zeroes off the sales prices, no one
would even bother. So, really, the only thing driving the theorizing is
the strings of zeroes.
Cheers,
Ted
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