https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/09/here-is-the-most-expensive-gif-of-all-time/379556/
As a business student and someone who spends way too much time on twitter, I have heard quite a bot about NFTs. Personally, I despise the concept and culture of NFTs. Their whole basis is built upon the idea of fabricated exclusivity and a select group “gaming the system” to create hype and desirability out of essentially thin air. I believe that the NFT movement has used digital art as a mask for greed, which culturally devalues art and artists as a whole in the long term. Although not technically an NFT, Michael Green’s piece “Balloon Dog Deflated” is eerily similar. Green’s statement that “culture itself has divorced itself from relating to the concept and value of a painting,” I think is a bit overreaching, and rings similar to attempts by other NFT creators to paint digital art as a replacement for tangible art. I disagree with this sentiment. I believe the attempt to compare digital art’s value to non-digital art’s value is dismissive of the extreme differences between digital mediums and non-digital mediums. Digital art is valuable in a way that is unique from non-digital art, and the two can coexist and interact in a way that grows their individual values more than the sum of its parts. The best digital artists do not try to manufacture scarcity, instead they use the vast reach and accessibility of the internet as a tool to create for a purpose other than profit.
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