The Problem with NFTs

It’s the video version of a long read at 2 hours but this highly researched myth and hype-busing video by Dan Olsen on cryptocurrency and NFTs is well worth watching. It starts with the last recession – the 2008 sub prime scandal – and the anarcho-capitalist fall out that begat cryptobros and all that. I used to see a lot of requests for freelance designers from ‘fintech’ companies and I steered well clear as I could see

And that how a lot of the same people are involved in crypto and NFTs and you can argue as much as you want about whether it’s MLM or Ponzi but it’s all a Bigger Fool scam. I used to be a big fan of the John Perry Barlow techno-preacher shiz, but now with the likes of Peter Schiel, Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos I see the early internet techno-utopia Yippie/Hippie buzz as another cis straight rich white man nightmare. Less LSD microdosing and universal freedom and more like gig economy slavery.

I know that even posting this might attract their Happy Happy Joy Joy cryptobro types like flies on shit. Don’t bother, I am not going to allow this blog to be astroturfed with your stealth NFT spam.

As an artist I have pointed out on Twitter about the problems with NFTs for artists, and various places posting this excellent and shorter video by Cat Graffam which is a great intro to the problems ethically, morally, ecologically and artistically about NFTs, but Dan’s video goes way beyond that into a deeper dive about how the very system is rotten to the core. With references and links.

Both are well worth a watch if you’ve been tempted by the crypto and NFT ‘goldrush’. It even verges onto the whole copyright/copyleft ad mashup sphere with the stealing of works and even White Panda hot on the heels of his $100k crowdsourced mashup album (none of that going to the original artists seemingly) launching his own NFTs. Fools and their money, etc.

As an artist I am fascinated with how fugly the art is, like they took the acid blotter art and lazy clip art style images you see around vape/skate shops and bad mobile phone cases and thought ‘I’ll have some of that’. And yes that includes the lazy art of Beeple and those apes; there is a good digital art out there but it’s not that.

And also i think it breaks the democracy of digital art; the very weakness (you can’t easily make money from it, the millions of possible copies in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction) is it’s very strength. It’s why I make mashups and podcasts and put them out for free. I agree deepy with that ethos, and am really concerned about attempts to bring patriachal and class-based ideas of capitalism into that space. Any ‘disruption’ is usually for the benefit of the same slave masters as before.

Currently fascinated with using AI generated pieces in my work, and didn’t know that sort of multiple ‘generative art’ was a thing. I might have a play – but more as a critique of NFTs and seeing how I can bend that to mess with their hype and make proper art commenting on their weirdness. It’s like Uncanny Valley but in clip art form, there really is no ‘there there’ as I commented. NFT = Not Fucking There.

And as Dan says, it’s about the ‘investment’ not the art, hence why traditional galleries are loving this shit.

Both are bad for artists though, as usual. Same shit, different masters.

Addendum: I do think I work in a postdigital space, I just learned of that idea from the video above from Cat – but more in traditional ways. As a kid of the 80’s I grew up making art on computers and it was a fundamental part of my process especially with photography, video and even glitch photo and video art and hacking around with VHS recorders and the like,

I rejected that a few years ago. I now work in very old-fashioned traditional media, and seem to be going back to previous eras – vintage fountain pens, soot and carbon inks, cave-men style painting, kids materials and finger=painting, sgraffito and sticks, primal and early things. The more I work on my abstract and even representational work, the more I go back to the 1930-50’s or before. Modernism and pre-modernism. I feel we took a wrong turn somewhere.

I am not a Luddite – I still work digitally especially with mashups, podcasts, streaming and the artwork for those, but it feels less integral to my art-making now, and more like a different strand or relic of a former life? I might try and bring these strands together more in future, for now I rarely cross the streams, but it can and does happen occasionally.

I do think there are interesting things to be learned applying the new digital tools to older media, or the older processes. Hacking the new with the old; commenting on the new with the old, remixing the old with the new and back again. But it has to be done with care, the separation is there for a necessary reason – scans of paintings and drawings aren’t the totality of the work, and remixing them can provide new ideas or be an artistic cul de sac? As always, it comes back to intent and the message, not the medium (sorry Mr McLuhan you were wrong)

The effect of generative art and NFTs I think will lead more to the value of the physical object, like MP3s didn’t kill vinyl, more the opposite – and also the desire to make digital things freely available that critique or subvert the idea of NFTs and crypto. I mean at the heights of excess of the Yuppies in the 80’s also rose the free software movement, Linux and the like. These things move in tandem quite often. Opposition and negation, yin and yang.

(Dan Olsen video via vixoriadrift)