nft – are tokens as new as they seem?

NFTs. 

They are everywhere. 

Lots of them.

Branching out at a wild pace.

New names are popping out here & there, daily.

And although I didn’t feel like becoming a crypto currency early adopter – when it was still a new thing – there’s one aspect of this movement which has recently intrigued me.

Just a tiny bit, though. Only worth a short blog post.

This story begins in 2009 when I was graduating from the Academy of Fine Arts. I was writing about challenges that digital imaging was facing at that time; Delving into how culture, advertising, and – you guessed it – digital art collections would be impacted by this digital imaging revolution.

With an emphasis on photography, as my faculty, I was looking at the challenge from different angles. What were the risks of digitally manipulated images? How did that influence people’s behaviour? Lastly, how to make digital assets – pieces of art – collectible?

Fake news wasn’t such a big issue like it is today, but it was also on my agenda.

My attention focused on obstacles preventing digital art from being truly collectible.

This was still an unchartered territory, even though people were collecting video art or other forms of non-traditional mediums for years. Like… art installations. Or conceptual art, which doesn’t exist physically, by its very definition. Or even better, art performances.

Collectors – and the art industry alike – turned to some collectible representations of those artworks, to make them ownable. Like some tokens, if you will. So, for example, you could be buying a VHS tape, or a print depicting a live performance. Or a paper note with a conceptual art idea captured on it. That was pretty much as far as it could go.

In a way, this was acknowledged in the art world for hundreds of years already, emerging from early days when easily replicable art techniques were introduced. It was the time when rules of collecting those limited – and therefore numbered – copies of art had to be agreed on.

So with the time being and new art disciplines being added to the – more or less – collectibles category, it was clear that this wasn’t the ideal way of tracking ownership and authenticity… How could you tell whether you owned the ONLY print of a given artwork numbered, let’s say, 51?

There was no way to tell that without an in-depth examination, or at least having an expert cast their eye. Well, until now. At least in theory.

NFTs promise to be the ultimate way of proving ownership of a unique asset. Apart from the fact that the same asset – like an image – can be listed multiple times on multiple platforms and sold for a hefty premium faking the original. Not to mention that there is still some maintenance cost, namely the energy, that no-one seems to have figured out in a sustainable manner. At least none that I’m aware of.

So the technology is here, with some teething pains still in presence. I guess, now it’s a matter of some governance, common sense, and best practice to drive further growth and adoption.

At least, I’m glad that issues I had pondered over a decade ago moved to a much more attainable state. Put the NFT hype aside – and there are some interesting use cases for the tech itself, beyond just trading virtual stuff with real money.

/K.