My mom teaches art history and her students (many of them graphic designers) have inquired about NFTs and whether they are a legitimate form of art. Both of us are skeptical about NFTs, but she's not as technical, so she reached out to me for help explaining them and resources that are informed critiques of NFTs. I in turn also reached out to my Twitter network to help me compile a list of resources for this purpose.
This post will not explain NFTs per se but will instead be a survey that links to related resources critiquing NFTs and attempts to market them to artists and game designers.
Also, feel free to submit a pull request editing or expanding upon this post. You can treat this like a collaborative wiki.
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This text is intended for a general audience. For anyone that wants to know what all the fuss is about and why they should care. Any artist who heard that NFTs are the future or art and any gamer who heard the same about video games. For anyone who got some lecture about how the future of the web would be built on this new tech that feels hard to grasp. For anyone who’s being bombarded with investment opportunities in NFTs that sound way too good to be true.
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/u/NoahDiesSlowly explains the problems with NFTs
/u/Zombiehypeasked "What's up with the NFT hate?" on/r/OutOfTheLoopand/u/NoahDiesSlowlysuccinctly summarizes the most common criticisms of NFTs. -
This is a YouTube video explaining some of the basics behind NFTs and the problems associated with them.
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Why NFTs are bad: the long version
This long article explains technical and economic details to explain both why NFTs are bad, why they don’t work (they don’t do what they claim to do), and explains the hype surrounding them.
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This post criticizes the technical underpinnings behind NFTs and shows that the marketing behind them is detached from the technical reality.
All this means that if your NFT is removed from OpenSea, it also disappears from your wallet. It doesn’t functionally matter that my NFT is indelibly on the blockchain somewhere, because the wallet (and increasingly everything else in the ecosystem) is just using the OpenSea API to display NFTs, which began returning 304 No Content for the query of NFTs owned by my address!
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This article written by a game designer explains the fundamental issues with game industry proposals to adopt NFTs. Yes, that is the actual title.
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Content Creators Are Having Their Pictures And YouTube Channels Stolen And Sold As NFTs
This article explains how NFTs do not protect content creators. Quite the opposite: they commonly profit off of their content without their consent and disrespect them along the way:
YouTubers Jim Sterling and Caddicarus are among the first to notice their channels being sold online, in a move that they're labelling "pathetic", "disrespectful" and "exploitative". Sony Santa Monica Studios' Alanah Pearce has also had her pictures stolen and sold on the site, with the sellers going a step further than theft, and photoshopping the game dev onto a porn magazine cover.
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I'd like to thank NFT community for stealing 13 pieces of my work and selling them as NFTs right now, without my consent. What a gift you got me.
— Robson Michel (@robmichel_art) December 26, 2021 -
Sadly I'm going to have to completely shut down my entire @DeviantArt gallery as people keep stealing my art and making NFTs. I can't - and shouldn't have to - report each one and make a case, which is consistently ignored. Sad and frustrating. pic.twitter.com/oNH6yXQtyU
— Liam 'Sharpy' Sharp (@LiamRSharp) December 17, 2021
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This site catalogs rampant fraud within the NFT ecosystem.
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NFTs Are a Pyramid Scheme and People Are Already Losing Money
On the surface, the NFT marketplace is made to look like everyone is making money, and while crypto might be rewriting the rules of economics, there is one dictum it cannot escape: for someone to make money, another has to lose money. NFTs do not magically generate wealth from nowhere; they’re taking it from those buying into the idea that everyone who’s getting in early is making a killing. As David Gerard, author of Attack of the 50 Foot Blockchain explains, “NFTs are entirely for the benefit of the crypto grifters. The only purpose the artists serve is as aspiring suckers to pump the concept of crypto — and, of course, to buy cryptocurrency to pay for ‘minting’ NFTs.”
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This documents an example of "wash trading", a common form of NFT fraud where people buy their NFT from themselves to inflate the perceived value. Wash trading is illegal, by the way.
On October 28, 2021, a bot that tracks sales of CryptoPunks, a set of NFT avatars traded via the Ethereum cryptocurrency, reported that CryptoPunk 9998, an 8-bit figure with shaggy white hair, had sold for $532,414,877.01. As expected, the buyer, who used “flash loans” to acquire the funds to purchase the NFT, sent the Ethereum to the seller, who in turn sent the NFT memorializing the ownership of CryptoPunk 9998 to the buyer. However, as part of the same transaction, the seller then sent the Ethereum back to the buyer, who repaid his loans. Finally, the “Punk” was sent back to the original owner, who quickly listed it for sale again at nearly double the original price, 250,000 Ethereum (over $1 billion).
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NFTs have me convinced that I could just operate a Ponzi scheme. And be completely transparent about it. Lay out my plans in a prospectus. And heaps of people would buy into it.
— Oregano Jones, Legal Bystander (@OreganoJeauxns) January 1, 2022
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The NFT's Aura, or, Why Is NFT Art So Ugly?
This post explains why NFT art tends to be ugly and devoid of artistic merit:
It's actually very difficult to talk about NFT art as art because most of it is so god damn ugly, vapid, and amateurish. NFT art is like, imagine if you took a bunch of dudes in a high school art fair, then put them in an echo chamber for a decade that constantly told them that everything they did was Epic Bacon, and then finally started handing them million dollar checks for that artwork. Does this sound like an environment where artists would develop self awareness, or intellectual depth, or aesthetic uniqueness, or any of the other stuff that a critic might be interested in?
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This article explains why NFTs are harmful for the environment. Yes, that is the actual title.
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Brian Eno on NFTs & Automaticism
This is an interview of an artist explaining his misgivings about NFTs and their benefit to society:
I am trying to keep an open mind about these questions. People I like and trust are convinced they’re the best thing since sliced bread, so I wish I could have a more positive view but right now I mainly see hustlers looking for suckers. And lots of bright-eyed artists willing to play the latter role. Forgive my cynicism… I’m not feeling too positive right now.
Artists curious about NFTs might appreciate process art or performance art critiquing NFTs:
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The NFT Bay asks if you would steal all the JPEGs
This is an article about someone orchestrating the greatest NFT "heist" of all time, downloading all of available NFTs and making them available via a torrent.
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This Powerful Right-Click Artwork Is Made of 10,000 NFTs
This article describes a mosaic depicting a person right-clicking to save an image, where the mosaic is created from NFT images.