Is NFT art any good? - The Verge

An art critic assesses the world of NFTs, from the Cryptopunk collection to artists like Mad Dog Jones, Pak, and Simon Denny.

The current state of NFT art is best described as “visual dogshit,” the artist and provocateur Brad Troemel argued in a recent Instagram slideshow. Nobody actually cares what these images look like, Troemel said, so long as they can be produced quickly in large quantities, while also avoiding risky artistic gestures that might alienate crypto bros.

“The defining production method across all NFTs is that they’re auto-generated as a batch of hundreds or thousands of images to be sold at a time,” Troemel wrote, a strategy that he believes was created to “give a lot of people as little as possible.”

Looking at the viral hype-driven NFT collections, it’s easy to see what he means. The biggest NFT series tend to be procedurally generated cartoons offering variations on a theme: a monkey with sunglasses, a monkey with a gold chain necklace, and so on. These characters are more like intellectual property than art. Like Pikachu or Baby Yoda, they can be endlessly exploited for their recognizability without having to offer us anything new.

This is a common frustration in the art world. In strictly economic terms, NFTs are the biggest thing to happen to art markets in a long time — but most of them are just so insipid that they’d be more interesting if they were actively, aggressively ugly. When investors spend vast sums for a prized token, they are mostly buying bragging rights, more like a rare Fortnite skin than an object of beauty.

But it doesn’t always work that way. Literally anything can be an NFT, even a physical object, as long as it’s tagged to a token on the blockchain. And if you look closer, you’ll find a lot of genuinely interesting digital art that’s been written off because of the general NFT exhaustion.

https://www.theverge.com/23148511/nft-art-critic-cryptopunk-replicator-pixel-pak-simon-denny


Post ID: 6170c6e1-77af-49a1-a0ab-2be77cabb65b
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Updated: 1 year ago
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