As an artist I would love to sell something for $69M. But I have not yet put a single item up for sale as an NFT as it seems so silly, you are selling a node in a merkle/patricia/etc tree, not a piece of art. The NFT art that is actually generated when you pay for it (and lives entirely in the blockchain), such as the bored apes, etc, is mostly predrawn parts assembled randomly; i.e. digital Potato Head toys. Some are based on interesting algorithms, but that has nothing to do with blockchains or crypto (other than using the hash as the random seed). I would rather create art (I do generational art as part of my work) on my own time and with my own tools. I would also prefer to sell art that people can put on their walls.
Some of what I see people selling for 10ETH are so unimaginative. But then again people in the past bought rocks as pets, so there is always someone with too much money and no sense...
Art itself is often overpriced, but it has a long history of increasing in value over time (since generally it is only made once and the artist eventually dies), and is a legit investment (and often handy for money laundering but then so is real estate and even startups). But NFTs are mostly uninteresting art, can be made in huge quantities with no work by an artist, and have no useful value other than bragging rights I guess. Museums who want to display NFTs are seriously hilarious.
Some NFTs are made by real artists who actually work hard on the works, but very few make any money at all (Beeple for example is a hard working real artist who got lucky) since NFT people seem to only gravitate to the auto-generated things like the apes.
Yeah, I’ve noticed this too. I feel like a lot of people in the NFT space have a pretty nihilistic view of art (i.e. “all art is worthless, so these procedural mix-and-match apes are as good as anything else”). They’re correct that the value assigned to art is often arbitrary, but the thing is that once you acknowledge that, the correct response isn’t to start buying random crap for thousands of dollars, it’s to buy things you want in your life for hundreds of dollars.
Like, would I pay $100 for a super high quality 2ftx2ft print of a diagonal gradient with two really well chosen colors? Yeah, possibly, if I thought it would look nice in my living room. Would I pay even $10 (let alone thousands) to “own” a PNG of that gradient in some abstract sense? Absolutely not.
Some of what I see people selling for 10ETH are so unimaginative. But then again people in the past bought rocks as pets, so there is always someone with too much money and no sense...
Art itself is often overpriced, but it has a long history of increasing in value over time (since generally it is only made once and the artist eventually dies), and is a legit investment (and often handy for money laundering but then so is real estate and even startups). But NFTs are mostly uninteresting art, can be made in huge quantities with no work by an artist, and have no useful value other than bragging rights I guess. Museums who want to display NFTs are seriously hilarious.
Some NFTs are made by real artists who actually work hard on the works, but very few make any money at all (Beeple for example is a hard working real artist who got lucky) since NFT people seem to only gravitate to the auto-generated things like the apes.