#45 NFTs- An Art Medium

Today we look at how NFTs are changing the art world.

Sep 22, 2021

This weeks private podcast.

In case you missed it here is a clip from our Cheat Sheet two days ago:

Night At The Museum

When you visit a museum you are first greeted at the door by some host with information about what is on display. You then wander down a series of corridors with paintings on the walls and the occasional sculpture displayed in the center of the room. As you walk through the halls hearing quiet chatter in the distance, muffled by the echoing of your foot steps off the almost empty walls. You stop to wonder at each painting- contemplating intention, how the image relates or doesn’t relate to you. You can see dimension in the painting, both visual tricks from the artists to create depth and the literal depth created by layering on paint. At the end of the hall, you approach a large bronze statue of a human figure and feel cool air emanating from it. You resist the urge to touch the statue to confirm how cold it must be as a “DO NOT TOUCH” sign in red gives you a feeling you are being watched. In the reflection of the polished bronze, you see that the museum guard is literally watching you because you’ve been acting a little strange. Wandering around the figure you can see it from every angle, admiring its smooth shape and noticing the way the light highlights its human features. That is until you get hungry.

Food crosses your mind and you are on vacation, so, the thought of some hot local cuisine does sound good. Smells of great meals of your past wander through your head as you start to salivate thinking about what you’ll choose this time. You feel a vibration in your pocket and pull out your phone to see that you just sold an NFT on Opensea for 400 ETH, an image of a cartoon punk-rocker. You quickly swipe away the notification as you are too hungry to think about the fact that the bronze statue in front of you, with its thousand years of complex history, is hardly worth 100 ETH.

A New Medium

You begin to wonder if you should have held onto that Crypto Punk. You look around the museum and notice, absent of the guard, there’s no one around. Especially no one younger than you.

This is because the new generation of art consumers are now sitting behind their computer screens. Many find themselves in the living room of their home, office at work, or at a store waiting in line swiping through the new two-dimensional world. A world that lacks smell, feel, and taste but it is rich with visuals, community and it does have decent sound quality. The generation currently growing up behind screens experience touch every time they click the mouse, press a key, or more frequently swipe their screens. Their salivary glands activate as they swipe through food delivery apps to order their next meal, and their apartment swells with the smells of spices in the food just dropped off by the delivery worker. As they sit by their finished meal, they wander through three-dimensional worlds in video games, swiping their fingers across glass screens as they browse social media apps, looking at pictures of what people are doing in the “real” world, or chill out to their favorite drama on a streaming app.

To this generation NFTs have depth, feeling and meaning. When their favorite social media celebrity announces they purchased one of one hundred in an NFT collection they think, “I could be one of the other 99 and be part of this club”. Do you really expect that less than a year of entering the public eye this new medium is now dead? That the height of the NFT craze is over? The digital world is lacking smell, taste and touch, a majority of the human senses, but this does not mean that NFTs lack a place in the future of art. Think of the daguerreotype, moving pictures, clearly these early forms were a fad, but they lead to the development of new broad reaching art forms: digital media and movies.

There could be a world where you wander through museum halls and find a dark room full of screens. As you enter the room you see on each of those screens an NFTs that make you wonder and think just like any piece of art would.

CryptoPunks’ Floor Price

CryptoPunks may not be the future of NFT art but it is the poster child.

If you are looking to get involved with CryptoPunks but don’t have 100 ETH laying around. You can participate in a Polymarket pool that allows you to bet on whether the floor price of CryptoPunks will be above 100 ETH on October 1st, 2021. This is a great market because, even though it ends in 8 days, the outcome is still far from obvious. At one point the pool was betting 87% chance that the floor price of CryptoPunks would be below 100 ETH on October 1st, but now the odds are nearly even again with 46% against and 53% for. This has a potential for a large return if you pick the winning side.