NFTs (thread now extremely NSFW)

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

http://blog.seanbonner.com/2021/03/12/wtf-nft/

it's hard to believe someone is comparing the environmental cost of cryptocurrency with the entirety of the global banking system
bitcoin's total value right now ~$1 trillion, I wonder how much the entire global banking system processes in a year?

Whenever I see this thread title I immediately think of newts and efts, as in this article. Once my brain saw this connection, it cannot unsee it.

from that artreview piece

https://backend.artreview.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/b1e-1230x586.jpg
"A popular internet meme of 2020 features an outraged bowtied figure who insists to another figure (representing the US Federal Reserve) that he can’t just ‘artificially inflate the economy by creating money’. To which the Fed character, next to a printer busily printing dollars, grins ‘haha, money printer go brrrrr’. Billions have been minted by central banks to support the incomes of people suffering the economic effects of the lockdown response to COVID-19. But printing money means that interest rates for fiat currency are effectively zero. In those circumstances, it’s not hard to see the attraction of moving fiat currency into cryptocurrency, or flipping virtual artworks that might increase rapidly in value, as Beeple’s CROSSROADS did in February, when it was resold for $6.6m, from an original sale of $66.6k. Cryptocurrency, NFTs and visual art have, without the artworld quite grasping it, combined at a moment when fiat currency has, in essence, become worthless, wages are dead and there is no reason for most people to save for a future that seems utterly without promise."

zero interest rate means money is worthless. right.

I always trust artists to have a firm grasp of Central Bank monetary policy. I would like the author of that piece to do a performance art piece where they destroyed piles of 'worthless fiat currency" to prove their point.

hard to put into words how fucked america is, but this article headline almost thoroughly does it pic.twitter.com/INMg4zyvz4

— Younger (@JustinYounger) April 8, 2021

the subheadline does it too

https://babbykense.medium.com/a-response-to-jisus-nft-superdocument-33ac27a5ad38

catching up to this one, in the wake of catching up to Jisu's popular 'voice of reason' / 'voice of the younger & minority NFT middle class'

blockchain is good because decentralization is good. what do NFTs ultimately decentralize? they decentralize authentication

When I see artists I admire promote N f Ts now I just smh

RIP NFTs

https://crypto.jayandsilentbob.com

just saw an artist friend has started doing this, guess he has no other way to stay afloat, sad times all round.

Is there any possible doubt in anyone's mind that these are going to be looked at as the pogs of 2021?
feel free to quote this to me in 2030 when beeple is president

I agree, but I thought bitcoin would be a joke by now.

bitcoin benefited from arriving on the last train before the end of capitalism, social media overload and nihilism as smart business
i imagine a sunspot is gonna wipe every server on earth and then all this shit will be so much dust in the wind aka SOON A CLEANSING

great news for "success kid" and "bad luck Brian"

https://www.yahoo.com/now/disaster-girl-meme-nft-214005699.html

the only nfts i deal in are nerds in the Fucking trashcan. suck my Dick

— wint (@dril) April 30, 2021

Interesting interview between curtator Michelle Kuo and artist Seth Price on NFTs here:
https://www.moma.org/magazine/articles/547

relevant quote

SP: You were talking about getting at some idea of what art is, or how it behaves. Actually, there is one way that contemporary art is kind of the perfect vehicle for NFTs. A financial instrument is a contract between people. That’s literally all it is, a highly abstract agreement. And that’s what art is, too. There’s a weird consonance there. Art has no consistent agreed-upon value, there’s no common definition of what art even is. So an NFT artwork is a pretty complex social agreement that, first of all, this is art; second of all, it has value; third, we’ll transfer it into this even more crazy realm. All of this transformation is a kind of suspension of disbelief, or a kind of magic. It’s like, the more we dematerialize everything, the more potential material we can get. We don’t really have a cosmology that can hold all these weird contradictions we’re making. That’s the paradox of the moment we’re in.