Help me understand the appeal of NFT art. I love digital art, but I don't see the appeal of spending money to get the token certifying you as the owner. The image/work is still out there and can be viewed/downloaded by other people. You don't even control it, unless the artist agrees to send you all of the files and delete them on his or her system. Your name doesn't even appear next to the piece when people look at it.
Sure, usually the tokens come with a print, and you support the artist, but those are things you can do via other means. What is the NFT adding? It seems only slightly more authentic than "buying" a star from a star registry.
NFT art seems like the dumbest/faddiest/scammiest idea to come out of the crypto sure yet, and not just because the art market is super faddy and maybe scammy already.
I know artists that think this is going to be their ticket. But it was never the lack of crypto that kept them from making money. It was the lack of any consumer value to their art.
There are two ways to make money as an artist: you either make a few, huge pieces that sell to very rich people (making your yearly bank on one or two pieces), or you make a huge number of easily reproduceable pieces that sell to the general populace. The difficulty in both is not the creation of the pieces. It's the marketing and sales pipeline. Both rely on selling a purchaser a narrative on what the art will mean to them. Exclusivity in the former, worldliness in the latter.
If you can't crack that marketing problem, you're going to ask equally zero pieces as NFT than as any other medium. And if you can crack that marketing problem, selling it as NFT does nothing for you as the artist.
Why do people buy originals rather than prints, often at a 10x markup? Why do they get certified dog breeds rather than mutts from the animal shelter? Why do people pay for skins and unique items in video games? Why will people spend $300K on a college degree when the coursework itself is available for free on the Internet?
A lot of times, people just want a limited-supply token from a third-party saying "yes, I paid for this, and that distinguishes me from the hoi polloi who got it for free".
NFTs are not easy to understand, but sit within the intersection of these two questions:
1. What is the value of art?
2. What is the value of money?
When we look for analogues, they're of the industrial era, things about intellectual property, branding, merchandise etc. This is a way of directly speculating on an idea. Is it a good idea? If so, then other people will want it, right? Then, the token must have value. There are no gatekeepers or enforcers to say otherwise.
Sure, usually the tokens come with a print, and you support the artist, but those are things you can do via other means. What is the NFT adding? It seems only slightly more authentic than "buying" a star from a star registry.