Re: <nettime> what does monetary value indicate?

["Ted Byfield" <tedbyfield@gmail.com>]

On 18 Mar 2021, at 13:21, I wrote:

> Felix, what you're talking about looks theoretical, but at root these 
> are really just questions of provenance, which the art world knows 
> about only too well.

Lo and behold:

< 
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/04/nfts-werent-supposed-end-like/618488/ 
>

	The only thing we’d wanted to do was ensure that artists
	could make some money and have control over their work. Back
	in May 2014, I was paired up with the artist Kevin McCoy at
	Seven on Seven, an annual event in New York City designed to
	spark new ideas by connecting technologists and artists. I
	wasn’t sure which one I was supposed to be; McCoy and his
	wife, Jennifer, were already renowned for their
	collaborative digital art, and he was better at coding than
	I was.

	At the time, I was working as a consultant to auction houses
	and media companies—a role that had me obsessively thinking
	about the provenance, ownership, distribution, and control
	of artworks. Seven on Seven was modeled after tech-industry
	hackathons, in which people stay up all night to create a
	working prototype that they then show to an audience. This
	was around the peak of Tumblr culture, when a raucous,
	wildly inspiring community of millions of artists and fans
	was sharing images and videos completely devoid of
	attribution, compensation, or context. As it turned out,
	some of the McCoys’ works were among those being widely
	“reblogged” by Tumblr users. And Kevin had been thinking a
	lot about the potential of the then-nascent
	blockchain—essentially an indelible ledger of digital
	transactions—to offer artists a way to support and protect
	their creations.

See also:

	https://www.wired.com/1997/05/site-aims-to-be-applets-r-us-of-web/

The NFT bubble doesn't have enough substance or specificity to support 
much theory. If you knocked some zeroes off the sales prices, no one 
would even bother. So, really, the only thing driving the theorizing is 
the strings of zeroes.

Cheers,
Ted
#  distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission
#  <nettime>  is a moderated mailing list for net criticism,
#  collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets
#  more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l
#  archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@kein.org
#  @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject: