Written by Harsh Mehta
Edited by Vyakhya Vashishth
Illustration by Shresha Kumar
Whenever we think about self expression and art, the first things that come to mind are tortured artists using the visual medium to express themselves in a symbolic way. Not just paintings like The Scream, Starry Night, and the Renaissance depictions of hell, but all visual art, such as the raw cries of help from The End of Evangelion, the horrifying works of Junji Ito, and the like. However, in recent times, there has been a corruption of that image. Art made specifically for the purpose to create a speculative market. One that came and subsequently died down for the most part-NFTs.
NFTs, or non-fungible tokens, are usually published on websites like OpenSea, in massive collections of AI-assisted and generated pieces of artwork, with the expressed purpose of being an investment to be bought and sold. Setting aside the ridiculousness of the concept of true ownership of a digital image hosted on a website that is not on a private server host, and what that ownership even really means, the core concept of an NFT was quite literally doomed from the start. It hinged on something known as a speculative market, where the sole purpose of owning the product being sold is to sell it to someone else at a higher price as demand for it goes up.
However, the very nature of speculative markets is temporary, as prices are inflated very fast with a wave of hype, till they become too high of an entry point for more demand to build on, leading the person holding the bag at the end to be the scapegoat with a massive loss as the entire market crashes. It is like an inflating bubble, it has to pop sometime.
However, the loss will not come to the person who created and sold said NFT, or the first few waves of owners who sell it off. The gullible person that just heard about NFTs on the news as its craze crescendos will be the one bearing the brunt of the collapse of value as they can’t find the demand to sell the NFT at an even higher price than they bought it.
While art has been commodified to a large extent throughout history, being used for tax exemptions, grants, status symbols, to launder money, etc., it has never been this overtly blatant and shameless. It has devolved to a point where the art itself doesn’t even really have a point, it is just a placeholder. The speculative market could arise around literally anything, the NFT art has 0 real impact on its value.
I believe that this shift follows the trend of current society as a whole, where late stage capitalism, the scramble to acquire as much money as possible and ‘the hustle’ have become integrated into every single part of our lives. Even the mode of expression that was once to be looked at and deciphered has become completely devalued to a lot of us, reduced to simple tokens to buy and sell to one another till it is time to move on. The NFT market popped, and today, only about 4% of the amount of sales take place daily as compared to its peak in popularity. The man who spent 3 million dollars to buy an NFT of Jack Dorsey’s (Twitter’s former CEO) first tweet lost about 2.9 million dollars with the market collapse.
The rhetoric used to market what was basically just a rugpull was that it was true ownership of decentralized art, except for the fact that the art is soulless, represents literally nothing, and ownership of an NFT on the blockchain doesn’t do anything in the real world as someone else could just go file for a copyright on said NFT image. In every single way, it was a scam meant to fail after a big hoorah, does that sound familiar?
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