Summary
I’ve been continuously following NFTs and Crypto Art since 2017.
The decentralised nature of the blockchain allows NFT owners to not rely on any authority that may disappear or change someday. Most of the NFT art is currently still on Ethereum, circulating in tokens of ERC-721 (original works of art) and ERC-1155 (more suitable for limited edition works). Now as long as you go to Etherscan, you can trade NFT on the secondary market to ensure authenticity without going through any gallery or even the artist’s verification. ‘Unlimited copy’ used to be the enemy of ownership. Now with the help of memory blockchain technology, ‘Unlimited copy’ is no longer a destruction of ownership. Instead, it can be compatible and coexisting. The decentralized ledger makes the vast network no longer huge and endless. Because there is always a wallet in the internet that marks the actual owner of the NFT.
The network shapes the digital art and there is no friction between the conversion of generalization and concretization. To the physical art, there’s something special about authenticity, storage and the ‘aura’ of the work. Once you invest in a physical art, it will cost the earth about premium and storage fee year after year. There’s a growing tendency for high-net-worth individuals to choose the alternative investment plus the illiquid nature. In the transaction of digital art, NFT can reduce these fees to almost zero. Commercially speaking , NFT technology greatly reduces transaction costs and friction, making production, transaction, storage all occur in a virtual world, and the whole process smoother and more natural. ‘The medium is the message’, this famous quote by McLuhan can also be used to examine the impact of blockchain technology on art. Although NFT is only a technical application, as an emerging technology, blockchain can change the way we transmit and obtain information, thereby affecting the information itself.