How to frame your NFT - The Verge

The market for NFT frames is growing fast, with manufacturers of digital photo frames and TVs competing with new startups looking for an edge. But what you should choose really depends on what you think NFTs are for.

So let’s say you bought an NFT. Not because you want to make a bunch of money and you’re just going to flip it — we’ll call those people the JPEG flippers — and not because someone sold you on a big idea about “community” and you didn’t buy an NFT so much as a link to a Discord — those are the yacht clubbers — but you bought it because you just liked the way the thing looked. Maybe you’re a collector, maybe this is the first valuable piece you’ve ever acquired. Either way, you bought it not to sell it or use it. You bought it to look at it. You want to hang it up in your home!

On one hand, you have plenty of ways to get your digital art on display. It’s just a picture, after all. (You could even — gasp — just print the thing and hang it on your wall.) Virtually any screen you have will display it fine, and it’s always right there on your phone anyway. But your 50-inch LCD panel won’t do justice to the piece, though, not really.

As NFT art gets more valuable, and as artists begin to care more about how their digital art is displayed in the real world, the question of how to display your digital collection has become a more complicated one. Galleries that want to promote digital art are having to rethink not just the devices they use but also the way they light their gallery and how people move through it. Artists, used to their work always keeping the shape in which it was created, now have to think about both digital and physical versions of their creations. Art collectors are often faced with an entirely new set of decisions about how to display their pieces. And you thought NFTs were complicated.

Scott Gralnick has been thinking about NFT displays for a while. He’s now the co-founder of Lago, a company building a $9,000 NFT frame designed for high-end collectors, but he’s been in crypto and Web3 for nearly a decade. When he talked to his fellow crypto whales, Gralnick says, the same thing kept coming up. “I have a multimillion-dollar collection,” they’d say, “and I had to retrofit it to a TV. I don’t want to show it on my computer, I don’t want to show people my phone, how can I get this into my home?”

Gralnick and his co-founders set out to build something for those folks, but also something that might entice traditional art buyers – who might not grok the idea of phone-bound art at all — to get into the NFT space. “I had friends who were doing dinners with Christie’s and Phillips and Sotheby’s, and they get NFTs, they get minted works of art,” Gralnick said. “But it came down to one question every time: how do I enjoy this at home?”

https://www.theverge.com/23153515/nft-frames-digital-art-wallet-tokens

---