NFTs have their uses, but saving artists may not be one of them
The Internet created a wicked problem and NFTs don't seem to solve it.
Last year was the year of non-fungible tokens (NFTs). As the Economist explained, NFTs “leapt from the more obscure corners of the internet into the mainstream in March 2021 when Christies, a British auction house, sold a digital work of art for $69m.” The lucky digital artist—Beeple, whose real name is Mike Winkelmann—gave the world a striking juxtaposition. He’d gone from selling his digital art for $100 a piece to a single NFT for tens of millions of dollars.
Since then, the public’s interest has only grown. And why not? The enthusiasts in the Twitter spaces I’ve been snooping in tell me NFTs are revolutionary. They let artists, like Beeple, reap the riches of their work by giving them something they never had before: a way to buy and sell ownership of digital things. As a non-fungible token, an NFT can signify ownership of a digital asset, such as a picture, a piece of music, or even a video. Think of an NFT like a plaque of ownership that comes with art you’ve purchased.
But what revolution? NFTs don’t solve the biggest problem artists have. The big problem with the so-called creator economy isn’t that artists have no way of making their work own-able. It’s that artists have no way of making it work, period. The revolution already came for artists and took their heads.
The easier it is to be an artist, the harder it gets
Despite the billions of dollars people spend on art every year, most artists can’t make a decent living. According to William Deresiewicz, a literary critic and former English professor, artists are struggling more than ever. “If the ‘starving artist’ of yore made little and lived cheaply,” he wrote in his recent book, The Death of the Artist, “that little is now even less, and the living is no longer cheap.”
The reason lies at the intersection of supply and demand.
Thanks to the Internet, the supply of artists has skyrocketed. Before the Internet, artists had to be discovered before being packaged and delivered to the rest of the world. Visual artists had to get through the curators who guarded the gates of galleries. Musicians had to ink deals with record labels. Writers had to find a publishing house to put their work on bookshelves. No matter the form, the art had to appeal to a few intermediaries with particular tastes. Perhaps the intermediaries upheld quality, amplifying the best and forgetting the rest. Or maybe they were parasitic barriers to entry. Either way, their effect was the same: they were a bottleneck that limited the supply of artists.
Now being an artist is as easy as turning on your computer and sharing your work with billions of people. The Internet democratized the means of distribution, giving everyone a way to circumvent the old guard of intermediaries. Christies is still around. So are Universal Music Group and Penguin Random House. But there are other options. Visual artists can show off their work on Instagram. Musicians can put their music on Spotify and YouTube. Writers can unleash a torrent of words on their personal blogs. Anyone can do it, and so many people are. Everyone is a kind of artist now.
The demand for art, however, hasn’t kept up. It’s not that we don’t like art. We do. It’s just that time and attention are binding constraints. There are only 24 hours in a day, and we have only a fraction of them to spend with art. Even if we spent all of our time with art, we’d still neglect the vast majority of it.
Combine the skyrocketing supply with the lagging demand and what do you get? Cheap art. Cheap in price. Cheap in quality. “The feeling that your work is being buried underneath an avalanche of amateur garbage,” explained Deresiewicz, “is one of the afflictions of the professional artist’s existence today.” The expectation of free has also beset the creative economy, with buyers propositioning even skilled artists with “exposure” or “future work” instead of money.
Despite tanking the prices that artists can charge, the Internet hasn’t reduced the biggest costs of being an artist: honing your craft and staying alive. Some of these costs have increased over the years, such as the cost of healthcare in the United States, or the cost of renting or owning a home in a major North American city, or the cost of an education at a fine arts college. Most artists also have less time to hone their craft. Having circumvented the intermediaries who used to run the business of art for them, they need to juggle the business of art and the artistry itself. This means “dealing with the nuts and bolts: planning and running a tour, organizing a film shoot, shipping and invoicing artwork, handling clients, chasing down payments, attending to taxes and legal structures, making budgets and keeping accounts—being, as one painter put it, a ‘one-man band.’”
By Deresiewicz’s account, the Internet hasn’t been good for the professional artist. The market for art has always been a long, fat tail of people struggling to get by, while the tiniest fraction of people manages to make a decent living of it. But if Deresiewicz is right, the Internet made the tail longer and fatter and the tiny fraction less capable as they juggle the business of art and the artistry itself.
NFTs are still a revolution in search of a cause
NFT enthusiasts see a revolution in giving artists a way to sell ownership of their digital art, like Beeple’s work. But artists can already own their work, whether it’s sold as an NFT or not. And though the Internet has made piracy and violations of copyright law inevitable, NFTs don’t solve that problem, either. In some ways, they make it worse. Pirates have started minting NFTs and selling “ownership” of art they don’t own.
With all the capital and talent clustering around them, it’s hard to believe that NFTs won’t help artists in one way or another. For example, they can help artists financialize fun. Buying art is fun, but buying art is expensive. This disincentivizes some people from buying art altogether. So how do you incentivize them? Make buying art a revenue-generating activity. Here’s one of many thoughts from Ted Gioia, an American jazz pianist and historian:
NFT technology could also turn music into a kind of Amway pyramid marketing scheme. Under this scenario, tokens are sold that convey resale rights—so each buyer gets rewarded for finding additional buyers lower down on the pyramid. This kind of turbocharged NFT thus empowers and incentivizes the fan to become a distributor.
Imagine an artist not only selling art to their fans. Imagine an artist also selling a way to make money. Fans will buy NFTs because they want to support their favourite artist. Fans will also buy NFTs to resell them at a higher price. It gets even better: because the NFT is just a plaque, you can imagine a world where fans get to turn a profit and keep the art. The art is digital, after all, and so it’s infinitely replicable.
Come to think of it, perhaps NFTs are just the ripples of the last revolution that cost artists their heads. Anyone can already make art and share it with the world with the click of a button. By making it easier to sell ownership of digital art, perhaps NFTs will make it even easier for anyone to participate in the creative economy.
But the easier it is to become an artist, the harder it gets.
If you found this interesting, please like it, share it, or let our community of readers know what you think in the comments.
Nice post. I agree that lumpy payoffs are lumpy for a reason. Though, It’s always felt like currencies would be better than NFTs for community shilling, but maybe I’m a crypto old head now.
One of the only things I find exciting about NFTs are the implications for broader interoperability between games. I haven’t really seen anyone working on an interoperability standard for skins & inventory yet, but if it does happen, expect there will be quite a lot of demand for artists from players who want their NFTs represented across game worlds.
If it’s not on your radar yet, here’s a post from Signal’s founder with some criticisms of OpenSea and crypto broadly that you might find interesting. https://moxie.org/2022/01/07/web3-first-impressions.html