My Collectible Ass - Journal #85

The more a file is shared and seen online, the more cultural value it accrues. Consider the mass production of posters and t-shirts of Warhol imagery. With increase in notoriety, the concept of owning the canonical work becomes more thrilling, and more a marker of social status.

8. Intellectual property will become less defensible in the short term but it is still cultural gold. From “my kid could do that” to “right click and save,” new media from the early 20th century onward has been poorly received. As W. David Marx writes of NFTs in Dirt, “whether or not this particular NFT bubble bursts, we should take them seriously ... See more

Through cultural associations, collections accumulate social and economic capital that is used by collectors to convey their status and taste.

Digital art suffers from perfect reproducibility, and hence, a lack of scarcity. There is no “real” version — even in the artist’s studio, copies proliferate in backups, on shared drives, and in cache files. For decades, we have experimented with watermarks and anti-piracy tech to try and enforce a physical, world-of-atoms scarcity on digital goods... See more