“THE ENVIRONMENTAL ISSUES WITH CRYPTOART WILL BE SOLVED SOON, RIGHT?"

There are mixed feelings about this idea- plenty of NFT artists are excited about monetizing images, plenty of people shrugging and saying it is fake ownership and doesn’t change anything about how files work online anyway (tbd- we’ll see how this settles out in legal spaces), and plenty of people horrified to see artificial scarcity imposed on dig... See more

Cryptoart recreates some of the worst aspects of existing art markets, pitting the super-stardom of those who have gotten lucky or who already had money and connections to play with against the realities of countless others who will see no such return.

Carbon offsets do not do what they promise, which is offset. But even if they did, you cannot use lifestyle or credits as an offset when you are actively building a system that does harm. Even if you, personally, come out more or less even on the books- to do so is to loan your power to a worldview that has doubled down on worth being tied to compl... See more

I’ve been working in digital spaces making artwork since well before cryptocurrency was around, and lack of scarcity is the only thing we’ve got.

Cryptoart creates artificial scarcity for digital objects, creating an “original” which can be owned for the purpose of resale.

Cryptoart smart contracts offer no legal protection, and any talk of contracts baked into the NFT “requiring resales to cut in the artist” or “compensate gallery workers” depend entirely on the goodwill of the purchaser.

Cryptoart remakes digital artworks as primarily tokens of monetary worth, content and concept secondary to an asset that has market value.

However, in a digital context scarcity must be constructed- there is nothing that demands the next block in the blockchain be harder to make than the last. If anything, the opposite should be true- computers grow ever more efficient and powerful. This means any scarcity is artificial, a process that demands ever more energy, ever more resources los... See more