My interest in web3 + art is from finding new livable income sources for artists generally. Less about big money speculation, more about getting more artists supported such that they don’t need a day job or purely commercial art pursuits (as opposed to “fine art”). I understand the current state of crypto isn’t near offering this outside of hyped speculative investments
I’m also not interested in ideas on a shelf that could do this better in an alternate reality but aren’t active
I also recognize there are uphill battles conceptually for both adopters and builders, such as ownership models where access is not exclusive (which is also not without precedence outside crypto)
Not interested in discussing these distractions: the perceived quality of current art, what types of art are more deserving of their artists having a livable income off, ideas on a shelf for solving this at scale in an alternate reality, scam activity, or pretending proof of work chains are state of the art
This is a solved problem: you pay them for their work, which is how artists have made money since time immemorial. The degree to which artists can make a living off their art is a function of demand and discoverability, not whether they have a payment system (they do need this, but they already have them).
I'd be curious to know what fraction of NFT enthusiasts had previously commissioned a piece of art, and of those how many were truly aghast at the dire state of payment systems without NFTs or at their inability to assert ownership via a blockchain. I suspect both are quite small.
The former is ludicrous, because Paypal/Kofi/Patreon/what have you offer a wide array of easy-to-use, feature-rich payment systems.
The latter maybe less inconceivable, but IMO it's driven by a desire to use blockchain tech for _something_, find something that it can conceivably do, and then deciding that that thing is therefore important. Personally, proving ownership and providence hasn't ever been a concern for any of my art purchases because they, like the vast majority of art, isn't worth selling a forgery of--nobody is coming to steal the forum avatar I commissioned or selling unauthorized prints of the obscure photographer I like.
This is just round three (or whatever) of blockchain being a solution in search of a problem: having failed to evangelize its wide use as a consumer payments system in general, its adherents moved on to hyping it as a solution to Enterprise IT problems (where selling bullshit is the name of the game anyway), failed to find traction (because everyone discovered it didn't actually solve any problems), and so we've circled back round to a consumer market, but now with more celebrity endorsements. It's still an effort to convince people that the blockchain version of something is much better and therefore worthwhile so that the worth of the tokens is tied to something other than transactions illegal goods and wild speculation. It's about supporting the livelihoods of people hoarding GPUs and wasting electricity to mine the tokens, not artists.
Buddy, think about the poor starving VCs. They got into certain coins at prices at fraction of a dollar. They need 10000x returns so they can keep putting 100m into a saas company that sales force can buy.
In the current system when an artist creates something and sells it, they typically get paid once, often lowballed. The buyer may turn around and sell it for 100x. The buyer made far more than the artist, who gets nothing in this scenario.
With NFTs the artist can get a cut of every transfer indefinitely.
Almost all art sold is only sold once. The figure I've seen is 0.5% of paintings bought are ever resold. Most artists would be overjoyed at someone flipping their work for 100x, because their future sales now look better. It is similar to gallery commissions, where 40% of hardly anything is a bargain and 40% of a lot is worth every penny.
Royalties are built into marketplace smart contracts. Individuals can do P2P trades where the artist doesn't receive any royalty but this doesn't happen very often. Anecdotally, it typically only happens on large deals and people who do a P2P trade often send the artist their royalty anyway (but still benefit from not paying the OpenSea fees for example)
Wait, so the purported royalty benefit of wrapping this in a contract can be circumvented, but the NFT tech is still good because people who circumvent this kindly send the artist the royalty anyway? Would they not be able to send the same courtesy royalty if no NFTs were involved?
Not what I was trying to say at all, I'm saying that NFT tech is good because the default option is that the artist gets royalties and this happens probably >95% of the time?
I think I felt compelled to mention that people send it anyway because it's good behavior and not all scams/crimes people say it is. In general I think the royalty thing is just one nice bonus of using smart contracts
Idiomatically, "shelved ideas". Shelving can be more abstract, but generally it's not idiomatic for abstract-concepts to be "on a shelf".
Language aside, I think you're being inconsistent with that concept: there are better solutions for compensating artists than NFT's already, so it's inconsistent to say that you want active-solutions as a justification for working on an less-active-solution.
I'm replying specifically to "Would they not be able to send the same courtesy royalty if no NFTs were involved?" which absolutely there is not already a satisfying solution in place. No thanks for the language lesson
Ownership transfer is done by a function call. The function often has extra logic like % of the funds for the transfer going to the artist. I guess you can cheat by sending a small amount in the transfer and seperately paying the seller the rest but then you make the thing you bought seem cheaper in the official records so that's in most cases counter-productive.
So I guess the next goal here is a startup to implement this as a smart contract to go full circle. The market will do it because any transaction fee is a hindrance to it's liquidity and is a possibility to undercut someone else.
Oh so it's a pyramid scheme as well? What a horrible payment system. Imagine if whenever you sold your car you had to take a fraction of what you received for it and give it back to the dealership (or rather, the manufacturer in this case).
>> "I'd be curious to know what fraction of NFT enthusiasts had previously commissioned a piece of art, and of those how many were truly aghast at the dire state of payment systems without NFTs or at their inability to assert ownership via a blockchain. I suspect both are quite small."
The main complaint I hear from actual commission-taking artists is that even something fun and innocuous but potentially readable as suggesting banned uses, like "fuck yeah," in the comment field on the paying side will make PayPal suspend your account. The artists I know are universally opposed to NFTs with more artists I know of coming out against every time a new NFT site launches with stolen art.
Yeah; the distributed ledger thing was always a funny value prop to me because it was like…so, replace what we already do today and are responsible for the accuracy of due to many various laws with…something orders of magnitude slower, orders of magnitude more complex, that requires orders of magnitude more compute power so we can…expose all transaction records to everyone involved?
Also, re: art, kinda agree: the current gallery system takes a huge cut of sale prices and a lot of galleries don’t do much to help artists. The real winners, though, are the landlords.
We’ve purchased art with checks before, and even in the “mid-range” price segment, logistics are much more of a problem than counterfeit risk. The logistical part still needs a good solution. Putting a large piece on a palette and trying to get a shipping company to treat it like the delicate and irreplaceable piece it is is tough and/or very expensive. Putting a canvas in the mail is a huge risk. Discovery is another big problem, as many people who might buy art don’t even know how to do so. It’s not like you just scan a QR code and enter your credit card details. A lot of it today is a very personal high-touch sales process that doesn’t always add value (much like cars, but sometimes with zero sleaze if you’re dealing with the actual artist directly). Once you get to the broker model and “if you have to ask” pricing it’s even more opaque and in more need of a solution that isn’t just auctions, but NFTs aren’t the solution.
It was never a solved problem, it was an addressed problem. And the method of address poorly allocated credit.
Maintaining records for art transactions, and thus enacting a fee structure that would benefit the artist when art is traded, traditionally meant introducing a middleman - and the associated overheads are why "fine arts" are known as a gatekept world and commissions have become the default for digital art. A sneer like "yeah well did you commission art before NFTs" is tautological. Commissions are the business model because they're available with minimal financial technology, not because they're ideal for society. The result you want is "more art is produced and more artists can afford to produce at a high level". But not everyone is interested in commissioning a large quantity of art of their furry OC getting porked. And likewise, people have trouble commissioning an artist to work freely without adding some kind of externalized upside like "build my own personal brand". There's a saturation point to that business model in and of itself.
It's only been relatively recently that artists also started to be able to access intellectual property law as a business model, but running an IP business involves a perpetual defense of property through legal enforcements, since we are in the age of mechanical reproduction. So it also has barriers to entry and ongoing overheads. I don't hear anyone saying that game developers should all work on commission, though.
The proposition of NFT art is just a revision of the gallery system - make intellectual work an asset, but on a much broader scale. The fee structure is automated, and the art itself is open to viewing and therefore doesn't need the same degree of IP enforcement as a paywall model; the only provenance question is the initial one of whether you actually minted your own work. And naturally, among the first people to have jumped on this are charlatans who have tested that exact question of initial provenance.
But I can say, having closely observed and participated a little, that NFT art on the whole is not uniquely bad or good, it's still "just" an art market, just one geared towards the artist who is interested in making their brand a speculative investment. And that is another way to get art made.
Assuming blockchain (and OpenSea atop that) count as "no middleman, no overhead" and not a new middleman (but it's a good one, because Andreessen Horowitz will make bank if it succeeds) atop technology that requires more energy consumption than small countries, it still isn't some magical wand that creates more people that spend disposable income on art.
Commissioning art is one of _many_ ways you can do this. Non-commissioned works are readily available too! I also purchase those! Some of these are one of a limited set (common for photo prints), some of these aren't (Bandcamp albums). Point being, if you were someone who wanted to buy art before NFTs, you could do so. I'm skeptical of there being some large market segment that desperately wanted to buy art but only realized they could with the advent of NFTs.
The royalty business model also already existed, where it made sense. There's no contract governing me reselling the painting I bought from someone at the local farmer's market because there wasn't any expectation on either my or the artist's part that it'd be resold at all, much less for a sum vastly greater than its purchase price. It's going to hang on my wall until I die, at which point it'll likely get tossed in a bin.
That's in contrast to say, a film score, where the expectation is that it will be resold (as part of your theater ticket price, but whatever) many times over: ASCAP exists, and handles paying the IP lawyers on behalf of its members, because that's a business model that works for them. They've been managing this just fine for over a century.
> atop technology that requires more energy consumption than small countries.
Look, this argument is a narrow one against PoW chains. You can point out correctly that a large share of the market/money is on those, and maybe Ethereum will or will not switch at some point, but it remains an argument against PoW nonetheless. Go support artists selling NFTs on Tezos then.
> This is a solved problem: you pay them for their work, which is how artists have made money since time immemorial. The degree to which artists can make a living off their art is a function of demand and discoverability, not whether they have a payment system (they do need this, but they already have them).
Some digital art cannot be printed (i.e. videos). "Paint my portrait"-style commissions are undesirable for many artists. "Here is some money create whatever" style commissions run into the same problem that for digital art, in that it is not clear what the buyer actually gets. People are commissioning NFT artists! It's all good.
The attitude of "buyers don't need NFTs they can support artists another way" is strangely inverted. If you can convince more people to spend money on art in other ways, that's great. Meanwhile, /artists/ need to find a way to earn a living.
How many new art buyers will NFTs bring when the speculative dust settles? How much will artists need to adapt to cater to that audience (i.e. creating PFP style collections?). We do know that the number is > 0.
I think Patreon and similar is probably a better avenue for digital. More consistent support than selling peices as NFTs or in meat space and with digital I think you're more likely to find 100 people willing to spend $10 for a new wallpaper each month than 1 willing to spend $1000 on an NFT.
I never said Patreon is passive income but it's consistent. The artist gets money for their output every month. People are only going to pay so long as they feel they get value. Unlike a subscription for rarely updated software you can still use that Wallpaper you got from being a patreon even if you're not subbed anymore.
NFTs aren't passive either nor are they consistent.
The whole point of NFTs is the scarcity aspect. Sure, you could maybe do 100 $10 NFT "prints" instead but now they need to manage that aspect and predict demand.
NFTs mimic the meat space art world with all the same problems like infrequent unpredictable sales with few benefits like convenience.
My concern around this space is less "does it make sense" and more "if the bubble collapses as I expect, what will happen to people who take the crypto/NFT money for granted"?
I'm more interested in solutions that I expect to be stable and last. I do understand why artists are hoping to cash on the NFT wave; I just worry that a lot of people will come crashing down along with the hype.
Unfortunately most new NFT projects are computer generated (no humans need apply). They have basically figured out that paying an actual human for the art is not needed when people will just buy cg art for the same price. There is one that just minted RGB colors. Its reddit AMA was pretty hilarious actually.
Those that do include human art have a strong tendency to just lift uncredited art from Pinterest or deviantart. Supposedly the purpose of NFTs was to provide the provenance for art. But it seems that most NFT art is stolen from actual artists.
Yeah, this is kind of what I meant by it being hard to project the combination of artisanship and rarity. I suppose that I personally would pay some money for beautiful programmatically generated art too, but that's probably a very niche market.
My interest in web3 + art is from finding new livable income sources for artists generally
You should track down the New York Times article from this past weekend. From memory, it says that despite all the hype, almost no artists are making any money from NFTs. The average sale price is less than $400, which doesn't even cover materials.
What is the pitch for how web3 will help artists find income without purely commercial art pursuits? Every single web3 art project I've seen has been entirely commercial.
Not sure what you mean exactly by commercial art pursuits? I'd say about 99% of NFT projects are garbage but I'm a fan of artblocks (https://www.artblocks.io/).
I can talk more about how the system works if you are interested, but some established generative artists have created projects on their platform and have made more than they could before web3.
When I say commercial art I don’t mean it’s not sold, I mean it in distinction with fine art. Commercial art means for example product photography or designing a book cover
That said there are also public goods approaches, either where you have ownership without exclusive access (interesting but not obvious to most people how to productize) or grant models
Maybe I don't understand the question enough because I'm wondering if DeFi is excluded as a viable answer, but possibly you're just not aware of it? But it seems like it's making lots of people money and that seems inclusive of artists.
NFTs are a shit way of supporting artist and a lot of high profile artist are just having people make NFTs with links to their work without permission so they aren't really making anything off this situation.
What makes it a shit way of supporting artists? I have seen some fraud like you describe, but I think it makes a lot of sense for digital only artists.
The fraud I describe makes it a shit way of supporting artist. As for digital only artist, there are plenty of non-NFT ways to support them. Commissions, Patreon, and merch to name a few.
If you were certain an NFT you were buying was not fraudulent and was created by the artist would you still think it's a shit way of supporting them? Is it bad that they have an additional way to make money on top of commissions, Patreon, and merch?
> If you were certain an NFT you were buying was not fraudulent and was created by the artist would you still think it's a shit way of supporting them?
Yes.
> Is it bad that they have an additional way to make money on top of commissions, Patreon, and merch?
The only reason NFTs sell for more is because of the hype and the likelihood of there being some bigger sucker to resell it to at an inflated price. This won't last forever and then you'll end up with the same same 30$ t-shirt-like prices but in NFT land. The "art" and "artist" involved is irrelevant here - what matters is that you have something that the current market has a lot of demand for.
fwiw I’m interested to explore the $30 NFT price point with a broader project (not pfp or 1/1 or jpeg stuff) and am a lot more optimistic for it than trying to deliver as much value or as little ecological impact with tshirt merch. I think you’re focused on the speculative peaks of what’s going on now, or only what’s happening within eth
I mean NFTs currently are an environmental nightmare. The common response to this is "but that will change with Proof of Stake" and I'll believe it when it happens.
It's already happened, maybe you're talking about when PoS is dominant / happening in eth, which is not all of crypto and not settled that it will remain dominant
I am referring to PoS in ETH and while it is not settled it will remain dominant, it currently is dominant so all the talk of how eco-friendly crypto will be is just talk until that happens. It is not settled that Proof of Work will takeover as the dominant mining method.
Excuse me - I started by talking about my non-eth non-PoW project, which absolutely is vastly more ecological than tshirt merch. Your response was that it is ecologically impactful then it turns out you’re talking about other things
I’m also not interested in ideas on a shelf that could do this better in an alternate reality but aren’t active
I also recognize there are uphill battles conceptually for both adopters and builders, such as ownership models where access is not exclusive (which is also not without precedence outside crypto)
Not interested in discussing these distractions: the perceived quality of current art, what types of art are more deserving of their artists having a livable income off, ideas on a shelf for solving this at scale in an alternate reality, scam activity, or pretending proof of work chains are state of the art