My Art Shall Remain Fungible. You cannot own it! A must-read for all artists taking the NFT train.
At first, I was excited About NFTs and artists finally being able to live off their art only to realize that we were tricked into the same money-making industry exploiting all artists who want to show off their art at any cost.
A catchier title would have been about how an artist sold his JPEG image for 69 million dollars, although it’s not exactly true, but sorry to be a party pooper.
In case you happen to be reading still, here is what you need to know if you are new to cryptoart and are considering taking the NFT train.
- NFTs are tokens that run on blockchain that are powered by servers and therefore all this rush for minting art and putting it on the blockchain is not eco-friendly. Vlad Alex covers some of these environmental issues in his article. But then again, one can argue that all emails sent, all online publications including this article, are polluting although much less than blockchain servers keeping many copies of every publication and transaction. The line has to be drawn somewhere.
- Paying a gas fee for these servers is getting more and more expensive. Today, the cost for minting an image as an NFT is around 50–90 USD on the Eth blockchain. The gas fee varies depending on the cryptomarket, supply, and demand. Assuming you will sell your artwork for thousands, a hundred is nothing to worry about, which leads us to the third and most important point:
- The cryptoart market has become suddenly over-saturated and unless you are connected with art collectors interested in your art and on the same network maintaining your NFT art, you are spending a fortune on gas and registration fees for platforms to host your images. You can certainly mint for free but then again you are asking for hundreds of servers to keep track of your artwork on an overheating planet. For example, one of the NFT platforms called opensea, has spent the equivalent of half a million dollars on gas fees only last Saturday.
- The art market is full of marketers. We need more artists, artists that create for the pure pleasure of creating and making art for art’s sake!
This is just my perspective after having almost taken that train. I might be wrong. I might become relatively poor, according to servers keeping track of a virtual currency allocated to each wallet owned by each person…
It is fascinating how much things have changed in the past decade. Yesterday, I intercepted a tweet inviting people to invest in a virtual coin, and in one of the comments below it, a user was begging for crypto money to be sent to his wallet for his family’s poor condition. An online beggar, I thought with disbelief!
All I can say, for now, is that my art shall remain Fungi-ble! You cannot own it but you can enjoy it (or most of it) for free! And you can enjoy what remains of our planet! I’ll pass the NFT train for now! And you?
Last but not least, is NFT art? NFT is a document certification tool. You can certify about anything with it whether you call it art or not. Once certified, it does not guarantee any quality or added value.
Regardless, the NFT trend (or bubble) seems to have already peaked after having benefited the art marketers more than the artists, unfortunately!
EDIT: Excited to learn about an eco-friendly #NFT platform on which I am hosting my very first #NFTart https://hicetnunc.xyz/objkt/12987
Here are several eco-friendly NFT platforms!
