NFTs (thread now extremely NSFW)

or get famous!

lol! sounds easy!

curious though, why did you say "(physical work, not digital)"? do you think the subset of people willing to subscribe to that kind of thing would be more enduring if they received something physical in the end, rather than a link?

i do! i think 25 a month for a unique piece of art (or two) is a not unreasonable indulgence for even vaguely middle class people if they like what you do but not if you're selling pdfs. I know i'm old but i think of digital as bonus stuff and the thing you hold in your hand as what you're paying for.

Some production potters rotate in new mugs for $45 or $50 and sell new ones to the core customer base every three to six month and that's how they pay the rent.

But they hit niche markets and are good at selling themselves. here's a bunch of production guys, might give you a sense of how they work their markets. No idea if these guys are "successful" but they have over 10k followers so they've developed a following at least!
https://www.instagram.com/murava_ceramics/
https://www.instagram.com/clarissaeck/
https://www.instagram.com/canopicstudio/
https://www.instagram.com/davezackin/

basically the rules seem to be that you learn to do something really well, then figure out the thing you would enjoy making for free for the rest of your life, then do it for almost free for several years and then you get famous in the smallest possible way and then you kinda make enough money to live. cheaper than college i guess.

yeah. i get that, i see what it takes. i think it's possible for some people.

but it all reminds me of something from the venture capitalist at the end of that NYT piece by Warzel:

Ms. Jin understands the precariousness but sees it differently. The path to a creator middle class, she argues, is to democratize your income streams across a variety of digital platforms. She described it to me as being like a pyramid — at the bottom are standard advertisements, which monetize viewers, even if they’re coming to your work accidentally. Higher up, you have affiliate links, where fans can buy something an influencer recommends. Atop that might be a subscription fee to a Patreon or Substack newsletter. Higher up still is custom merchandising or social media posts for superfans. NFTs, she argues, are for the single superfan — a creator’s one true fan who is willing to shell out an extreme amount of money.

As we spoke, I argued that NFTs seemed like the ultimate way for creators or influencers to monetize their audience’s attention. She suggested I had it backward: NFTs are a way for those with enough means to gain the attention of a creator. “In this case of my NFT, it’s really that I am paying attention to him,” she said, referring to Mr. Young. “I ended up forming a real bond with him because of his investment in me and my idea.”

Are NFTs just an attention hack? Why shell out $1 million for a tweet from the billionaire Elon Musk if not to catch the eye of the notoriously mercurial richest man in the world?

While NFTs as the ultimate form of patronage makes sense, I’m still unconvinced that they help solve the problem of the internet’s class inequality. This isn’t to impugn Ms. Jin’s work as an investor in companies trying to lift up new creators and build a more sustainable business model. I first reached out to her in part because her work has centered on creators as a powerful and important segment of the digital economy. But the current pyramid structure Ms. Jin described to me sounded like an exhausting hustle (she agreed). It also seems to herald a maturation of the attention economy — one that feels increasingly precarious and that continues to privilege those with big audiences whose attention is worth a considerable sum.

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/24/opinion/what-are-nfts.html

oh it is absolutely an exhausting hustle! i don't personally know a single artist without a rich family/spouse who lives comfortably. but i think they do it because they have to.

an exhausting hustle. that sounds exactly right. that's how i feel, just thinking about this shit. "you have to be willing to do it for free", i completely agree. i'd say you have to be willing to do it at your own expense, actually, because that's more accurate. we don't have basic income, we don't have enough kingly courts to bestow drunken patronages to artisans, and mostly, we have an incredible oversupply of art, and very little demand. in order to exist within this, it has to be an exhausting hustle. how else will we know who the fittest are unless others don't survive?

i guess i don't blame people for jumping to NFTs. they're a scam, but so is everything else, it seems.

i think that's why my mind drifts to schemes that centers around people getting a minimum/living wage. that's what i want from other artists, too - i don't really care to support people whose ultimate goal is to make money. i get that people have to feed their kids and pay for medical bills and all that shit. but i think it sets a good standard to show that you're just trying to achieve the minimum viable wage. i dunno. i don't know what the fuck i'm talking about

in a reverse pyramid scheme of human empathy, the subscriber threshold for "activating" a project would be at a level high enough to guarantee a living wage during that time period for the artist. any surplus subscriber money/donations would be applied to another artist working under a similar living wage system

^^honestly, that's the kind of thing i want to do^^

why is that so hard?

and then, it's like if it doesn't hit that threshold (100 people, 300, whatever), then it doesn't fucking happen, and you don't have to go through the humiliating process of watching your patreon dwindle down from 9 to 3 subscribers after week 4 while sending out miserable updates about all the upcoming work you're so proud to show

plus, the reverse pyramid scheme of human empathy puts a cap on success. yeah, you could get more subscribers than the amount needed for your livable income, but by design it's not a fucking fame contest, it distributed the surplus to other people who need it. i think that's a better goal than something like instagram, where the goalposts are evershifting (500 followers! no, 1000! now 10K!...but the true level of success is always out of reach?)

who is it that basically predicted / theorized all of this? *looks up "theorist who argued that capitalism turns everything into a commodity" and finds wikipedia article on karl marx's concept of commodity fetishism* oh

listen, i'm familiar with the marx brothers, groucho is my favorite

See I like harpo

I have been running my own poetry writing workshops digitally for a while. It's made me about 12 grand or so since last summer, and is a great way to read work from both established and very green writers without the absolute bullshit of academia. It's a hustle, and a ton of work, but it's my life's work, and I hardly advertise any longer, word of mouth really works.

that's so cool. that's the best.

I also know a lot of ceramics and other visual art based people who make quite a living from their stuff.

Part of it for some, tho, is having a built-in audience. I have a pal who makes jewelry using old railroad china, and old train nerds and foamer types make her releases sell out in literal minutes. It's nuts.

Another thing is that some friends make more low-key items that are 'low stakes' like stickers and badges, then the audience finds out they are also making lovely vases or coffee mugs.

Anyway, I guess I feel like it's a double-edged sword, as such projects can take away from the impulse of the artist, and lead to burnout really fast. I did two workshops on different days while I was working full-time just recently, and it made me want to die because I had no time for myself or my own writing and reading.

back when I had an art job, I seriously was talking to my boss about possibly commissioning you, Karl ... or like, some small stipend to feature your web-work on our blog or something ... idk, I spend a lot of time talking to artists about money and the hustle and seeing what they make, and how, and ... it's really challenging.

i really appreciate that, sarahell. that's really nice of you, it really is. <3 thank you. i think if that would have came through in the last few years, i would have massively fucked up the opportunity! i think the thing that precipated my big breakdown a few years ago was the Longmont Potion Castle opportunity. Seriously, basic income is better for me. just give me a check, let me do my thing for just a couple people. hustling is terrible for me, it hurts my body

i just had a really wonderful moment that probably illustrates a healthier relationship to art (for me). i just learned how to play find the river on guitar, and then sweetness followed followed, on spotify, so i learned how to play that last night. i just got my second shot in my arm, and i'm going to a backyard BBQ at a friend's place in a couple weeks with some early vaxxers. maybe i'll just play those songs for them. i don't do that, normally (ever. at all), but i feel like just doing it and they all know that i'm in a weird place and be accepting and understanding of it, i think. these are people i know, and i'll play them the songs and they'll remember that i liked rem a ton in high school 20 years ago, and i think they'll appreciate that. that seems so much better than having some special motion graphix trick appreciated by some libertarian turd for .42323 ETH, and having that awful subsidiary thought "should i do this stupid mograph trick again, only slighly better, to please some other turd for slightly more?", gross!

https://www.vice.com/en/article/pkdj79/peoples-expensive-nfts-keep-vanishing-this-is-why

Clements distinguished between the NFT artwork (the image) and the NFT, which is the little cryptographic signature that actually gets logged.

"I use the analogy of OpenSea and similar platforms acting like windows into a gallery where your NFT is hanging,” he said. “The platform can close the window whenever they want, but the NFT still exists and it is up to each platform to decide whether or not they want to close their window.”

This is such a tortured metaphor. They had to hint that the artwork is still on their platform (it is on their server, but they'll never make it available), which led to "windows" in a gallery.

Show me your NFTs dude

*looks toward the clouds*

Some say they’re always there, if you have the eyes to see them

An NFT for a picture of 1 paper share of circuit city stock

can't we just go back to trading stickers

Pogs, please

Last month, Tom Kuennen, a property manager from Ontario, coughed up $500 worth of cryptocurrency for a JPEG of an Elon Musk-themed “Moon Ticket” from DarpaLabs, an anonymous digital art collective. He purchased it through the marketplace OpenSea, one of the largest vendors of so-called non-fungible tokens, or NFTs, in the hopes of reselling it for a profit.

“It’s like a casino,” he said in an interview. “If it goes up 100 times you resell it, if it doesn't, well, you don’t tell anyone.”

:D

i don't have a very large art collection. just a few real things. but when i look at them, i do think of the potential profit, and it brings me great joy, perhaps the greatest i've felt

gee, i hope elon musk's butthole rises in value today

a rising butthole lifts all shits

i have brought this upon myself

he may have turned to the dark side, but lol

https://davidoreilly.medium.com/the-definitive-nft-medium-article-500855317d8a

list of links at the bottom hits kinda hard after all that

It is from this turning point that I began a journey of discovery that opened my eyes to the danger and cost of this technology. Make no mistake — NFTs are not harmless and not benign, and have zero to do with artists making money. They are — and I do not say this lightly — without a doubt the single greatest threat that planet Earth has ever faced.

not that any of this justifies NFTs, it's just quite funny

Oh, I kept reading. Well I’m still the king

for you Karl

paddington bear has made an NFT (New Friend Today)

— Paddington Bear Updates (no affiliation) (@fakepaddington) March 30, 2021

One of my favorite crypto-asshole arguments is that crypto is actually GOOD for the environment because the demand it creates for renewable energy is driving innovation, or something.

every fucking dipshit is using NFTs as their april fools joke, brilliant work marketing people

NFTs may finally bring about the magical economy, where everyone in the world's income is derived from taking in everyone else's laundry buying and selling NFT-tagged images.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/videos/2021-04-03/robot-s-nft-art-sells-for-over-688k-video

https://artreview.com/why-the-artworld-loves-to-hate-nft-art-beeple-christies-grimes/

good ^^

I feel like even calling it "NFT Art" is a misnomer. It's digital art. An NFT is just a thing you sell that is nominally attached to a piece of digital art.

But what kind of digital art is valued by NFT investors? So far you aren't seeing NFTs for Sothebys-style art make much of an impact.

i prefer "NFT Art", because it carries with it the meaning "this is shitty art, in addition to the shitty people who buy and sell it"

But what kind of digital art is valued by NFT investors? So far you aren't seeing NFTs for Sothebys-style art make much of an impact.

modern art institutions are coming around to digital art in slow motion (comparable to how it took decades for the "art world" to come around to "motion pictures" at art, or the excruciating "conversation" around the idea of "games" as art now)

imo a good artist should reject NFTs and crypto-bullshit, but they sure as fuck better be rejecting whatever "art world" previously existed as well.

trying to sell good digital art to a NFT turd is like selling pogs to a rich adolescent

NF(art)T