NFTs Are Here to Stay
Frens, I have never been more excited about the future of art. Here’s why: for 20 years I have made art and shared it online. GeoCities and Yahoo groups. Livejournal and Myspace. Years spent on deviantart, Tumblr, FB, IG. Yet, no online community I’ve witnessed is as supportive as the NFT Community. It’s all artists-supporting-artists in ways that feel super DIY. Sure, some treat NFTs purely as an investment class asset, but more often what I’m seeing are collectors flexing their taste and connoisseurship. Besides, so what if day traders wanna rain coin on artists? Isn’t it time creators got paid?
Over the last decade the Art World has produced an enormous glut of art school grads saddled with debt (🙋🏼♂️), all competing for clout and a rapidly dwindling number of opportunities. It’s been a race to the bottom that has many creatives plugging away on social media for free. The morning of Facebook’s recent outage I wondered aloud, “how much money do I make for Facebook with every post impression I get?” About six cents, I learned. ‘Why don’t creatives just strike?’, I asked. John Crain, a founder of SuperRare, was recently quoted in the NYT: “If digital culture could be owned and traded, an entire new market could emerge, he told me — one with high-earning artists but also, he hoped, a “long tail” whereby even obscure artists, with only a few fans, could make a bit of money.” https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/12/magazine/nft-art-crypto.html
The promise of the “long tail” is nothing new. In 2004 Wired boldly proclaimed “Forget squeezing millions from a few megahits at the top of the charts. The future of entertainment is in the millions of niche markets at the shallow end of the bitstream.” https://www.wired.com/2004/10/tail/ That’s not quite what’s happened. Web2’s recommendation algorithms further stratified winners and losers and stoked civil unrest for profit, all while exploiting creatives for ad dollars. Now, web3 is poised to revolutionize the way we connect— what that future looks like is still hazy, but one thing is certain: web2 is waning. And at the forefront of the web3 is a tight knit community of artists making waves and making money.
There’s a sense of righteous antagonism towards the traditional gallery system for excluding and pigeonholing digital art for years. Equally, trad galleries seem to reject NFTs outright as unscrupulous speculation. For years I’ve been talking to friends and fellow artists about the problem of selling physical art to digital natives. If you make your living virtually, you aren’t likely to have your colleagues over for a dinner party where you show off your collection of original paintings. Then there’s the real-world problems of tracking provenance and collecting royalties on secondary sales. The blockchain is ready-made to solve these. I hereby urge gallerists, curators, trad artists, anyone with a vested interest in the art world to take note: NFTs are here to stay. Learn the ecosystem and stay humble. Stop, collaborate, and LISTEN.
