The concept of NFTs is ridiculous, and the only thing surprising about their crash and burn is that it didn’t happen sooner.
Non-fungible tokens (NFTs) are pieces of digital art meant to be collected and traded for real money. The term “art” is being used fairly loosely here; while visual art is the most well-known type of NFT; music, videos or any other digital upload could qualify.
Purchasing an NFT may be described as taking “ownership” of that digital art. You might not have a physical representation of what you own, but when you see your digital token on your screen, you have the satisfaction of knowing that it belongs to you.
NFTs may also be described as the most foolish investment a person could ever make.
If someone purchases an NFT of visual art and it gets posted online (which they often do), there’s no way to stop anyone else from screenshotting the art, saving it to their camera roll and displaying it online anywhere they’d like. There has been criticism directed at those who use others’ NFTs for their own profile pictures, but guess what? That’s the nature of the internet. If you buy a piece of digital art and want to use it for self-representation on the Internet, there’s no one but yourself to blame when it inevitably gets copied and reposted.
The same cannot be said for physical art, such as a painting or sculpture. Those who purchase a unique painting have the only verifiably real copy of that work. There’s more to a piece of art than the artistry itself – when there is only one original copy of a work of art, the piece is also special because of its creation and the people who made it. For example, if a stranger made a replica of the Mona Lisa, it might look virtually identical to the human eye, but it’s not the same piece of physical artistry that Leonardo da Vinci created himself. It looks like the Mona Lisa, but it is not the Mona Lisa. It could never hold the same value as the original.
This is why replicas aren’t the reason people go to museums – they go to see the historical artefact created by the original artist: a physical work of art that can never be seen anywhere else. If another museum opened an exhibit featuring an exact replica of the Mona Lisa, it might attract some eyes as a novelty, but no one could ever claim it holds the same artistic significance as the original in the Louvre.
The same cannot be said for art that only exists digitally.
If someone purchases an NFT and it gets screenshotted by another user, that user logically has access to the art every bit as much as the person who paid for it. They have an exact 1:1 version of the original art that is representative of the artist’s work in every way. A screenshot is not a replica or a meaningless copy – it is the exact asset that was paid for by the NFT “owner.” The person who took the screenshot might not have the paperwork to legally confirm that they own the image, but if they want to post it online or use it as a screensaver, there’s no way to police this across the Internet.
Essentially, the NFT owner is buying a contract that gives them the satisfaction of feeling as though they made a justifiable purchase. In reality, hundreds of other people might already “own” the same NFT in their phone’s camera roll by taking a screenshot.
After a couple years of mainstream discussion, the NFT industry has finally crumbled. A recent report by dappGambl reveals that 95 per cent of NFTs are entirely worthless today, with many of the remaining 5 per cent reaching only a fraction of the value they had years ago. This means that around 23 million people who purchased NFTs are walking away with penniless investments. Currently, only one per cent of top NFTs have a value of over $6,000.
This is a dramatic shift from a couple years ago, when NFTs would sell for millions of dollars. Justin Bieber’s Bored Ape Yacht Club NFT, which he originally purchased in early 2022 for $1.3 million, has dropped to a value of $59,090.
It’s important to understand that individuals losing their life savings over failed investments is tragic, and this situation is no different. Purchasing an NFT may have been inherently ridiculous in concept – and people should have known better as such an outcome was painfully obvious – but lives being ruined is nothing to celebrate, regardless of the foolish mindset that created these self-inflicted problems.
With that being said, on a greater scale, the downfall of NFTs is ultimately a long-term positive. Selling digital art for incredibly high prices, only to sell the satisfaction of “ownership” of something that can be easily spread around, hurts the art world and promotes false ideas of what it means to own a work of art.
It was only a matter of time before NFTs had to go, and anyone with a basic understanding of art, ownership or the Internet should have seen this outcome from a mile away.
