Top #cryptopunk sales from 2 years ago compared to today. What a difference two years makes.

Celebs react to my impression of them pt. 2!

1/ On NFTs are Network Art One common piece of feedback from TradArt (museums, curators and so on) is along the lines of: "We have been collecting and curating digital art for decades. we know this field and, maybe a few NFTs are good digital art, and many, of course, are terrible digital art, or even not art at all, but collectibles really. So we are charmed that you are so excited about your digital art NFTs but we have been excited about this field for decades." This sounds totally reasonable but it is also totally wrong. The fundamentally important thing about NFTs is not that they are digital art, but that they are network art. 2/ Digital Art is art of the computer, in its many forms. Mainframes are computers. PCs are computers too. But modern digital SLRs are also computers, as are tablets and phones. 3/ Computers, of course, have been the defining technology of the last 50 years, they have reshaped society, how we work, think, play, communicate, organize, love. So, of course, artists, collectors, curators, casual viewers have been influenced and changed by digital art. And the museum curators are right. Digital art has been interesting since the 1960s and is on its fifth generation at least: algorithmic, generative, graphics, interactive, immersive. 4/ OK, so great - "There has been digital art for 60 years, NFTs are digital, it is the latest of a long line of digital art, this is what we are saying, we will slot it into the "net art" category" No! It is a trap. The fact NFTs are digital art is not at all the important thing about them. 5/ Digital Art is made on computer (broadly defined) or may live on a computer or both. NFTs may or may not have been made with a computer but they definitely do not live on a computer. NFTs live on the internet! 6/ What I am saying here is not a vibes concept. It is a hard technical fact. People sometimes look at a hardware wallet and get confused and think that their NFTs (or ETH or BTC) are "in the hardware wallet" like it is some form of USB drive or something 7/ Of course that is not where your BTC, ETH, cool cartoon character with a hoodie and flashing xcopy NFT lives. It does not live in your Trezor. It lives on ~10,000 Bitcoin or ~10,000 Ethereum nodes that each form a special purpose global network called Bitcoin or Ethereum 8/ Whether your NFT is 100% on-chain (like a generative art ETH NFT) or 100% in the optional but not required to hold but most do anyway part of BTC (Ordinals) or partially on the Solana network and partially on the IPFS or Arweave network, the main picture is exactly the same. 9/ Your NFT is not on your PC, it is not on the PC of the MoMA, it lives on a specialized, permissionless, open to everyone in the world, network. When you "own" your cryptopunk, what you actually have is the password to move a specific cryptopunk to somewhere else in the network. You can't remove it from the network, you can't move it to the safe in your house. Your NFT is of the network, in a way that the Picasso in your living room is not. 10/ Before everyone says "aha, I knew NFTs were a scam, just a receipt" I would like to kindly remind you that Bitcoin works this way too. You don't "own" a bitcoin, what you actually have is the password to move certain "Unspent Transaction Outputs" to somewhere else in the network. You can't remove your bitcoin from the network, you can't move it to the safe in your house. Your bitcoin is of the network, in a way that the gold coin in your safe is not. 11/ All of the interesting things about NFTs emerge from their networked nature. The fact that they are default public. The fact that they are composable and programmable. The fact that they are transparent. The fact that their provenance is 100% perfectly pristine. The fact that they can make rock solid assertations of truth (this NFT was created right now, randomly, based on this algorithm). The fact that they can organize groups of people. None of this emerges because they are "digital art" All of this emerges because they are the first and only natively network art. They are art that is quite literally of the network, that lives in a network, that does not live in a computer, a home, a gallery and museum 12/ My curational mental model is very different from TradArt on this topic. They split as follows: (Non-Digital) Art | Digital Art (including NFTs) I split like this: (Non-Digital) Art and Digital Art | NFTs 13/ In other words I think a cool digital graphics installation at the MoMA is fundamentally no different than a Lichtenstein at the MoMA By their nature, they are physical, individual, assets tied to a specific place, time and owner. It is cool and interesting that one was made with a computer and one was not, but this does not change their fundamental physical nature. Whether the MoMA owns an oil on canvas or a hard disk with the graphics files, it is still personal property of the MoMA in the way we have understood property for tens or hundreds of thousand of years 14/ NFTs (and BTC) are something different altogether. They are everywhere at the same time. If the MoMA buys a Fidenza, it does not have exclusive physical possession of the actual colors and lines of that Fidenza. Those lines are represented as data within a certain block of the Ethereum blockchain, which has been replicated to 10,000 plus computers around the world. Anyone can see them, anyone read them, anyone can render them. Anyone can download an Ethereum node and copy them. Anyone can write a smart contract that interacts with them. Nobody has to ask the MoMA's permission. Nobody has to ask the artist's permission. 15/ This is not radical, this is beyond radical. If I strolled into the MoMA and hooked up my art project that interacts with their digital exhibition or their canvas on the walls without their permission, I would be arrested and banned for life. If someone deploys a smart contract that says: "you can mint this NFT if you have a Fidenza and if your Fidenza is a spiral, your mint will look like this", nobody can stop them and nobody will stop them and, because of this, everyone will actually say "great, have fun" 16/ NFTs are a breakthrough of the exact same order of magnitude as Bitcoin is. They are not a continuation of digital art. They are a fundamentally different type of property, in the same way that Bitcoin is a fundamentally different type of property. 17/ Do the examples look trivial right now? "this mint is derived from this other mint - who cares?" This is because every important new thing looks like a toy. 18/ We barely have understood what can be done with NFTs, let alone done it. The next few years will be full of amazing experiments and, by the end of the decade, we will start getting a hang of what can be done. There will be so much more to come on this. 19/ But to close this thread off, let's go back to where we started, to the most simple explanation of NFTs. NFTs are network art (and collectives and games and identities) The first time in human history this was possible was in the early 2010s. We are the beginning of the beginning of the beginning of such a grand adventure. It is going to be so much fun.