Scarcity Cred | No Mercy / No Malice

Even Beeple thinks the current mania is a bubble, as he told my podcasting partner Kara Swisher. But the history of the art market is a history of bubbles, as are the histories of finance and the internet. All are still with us.

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

At the high end, digital art sold for millions doesn’t really need an NFT, just as Bowie didn’t need crypto to securitize his royalties in 1997. Christie’s could have just as easily sold an embossed paper certificate, and entered the buyer’s name in a leather bound book securely held at Christie’s headquarters. But that sort of infrastructure isn’t... See more