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Comment by rainsford | Hacker News Reader

I would actually tend to agree. I think the organizers deserve all the scorn and dunking in the world, but I'm less comfortable about that framing for those impacted. "Conference organized by the monkey JPG people" should be a major red flag, but it wasn't a red flag for the target audience for probably the same reason "monkey JPG" wasn't in the first place.

Similar to the Fyre Festival, the real villains are the scammers (or idiots, if you're giving them the benefit of the doubt) running the show, not the people who fall victim to the scam. Cryptocurrency and NFTs fall into that category where I think recognizing the BS requires a level of technical knowledge that is unreasonable to expect everyone to have. Dunking on people who don't get the technical argument for why NFTs and the people promoting them are BS does not feel like the way.

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NFTs, and even monkey JPG NFTs, are perfectly sensible when viewed as art projects. (Not as finance: financially, monkey JPG NFTs are rather silly.)

And by 'sensible' I mean sensible compared to weird things other people either do for art or spend money on for art. Compare eg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Performance_art (and that's far from the most egregious corner).

Arguably Christie's (the auction house) invented the concept of NFT before there were NFTs.

I mean, the value of art may be undervalued by society in general, but paintings that sell for hundreds of millions of dollars is just insane. The art collectors are just using art pieces in the same way crypto folks are using NFTs. The only apparent difference is that there's no physical object for NFTs, but the physical object was never the main value proposition for traditional high value art anyway.

You're absolutely right, but at least there is some underlying art-intended-as-art there. Just as much of the stock market can be viewed the same way but at least there usually is an underlying company with some value behind the stocks. With NFTs there really is nothing there. It's finance without any art component.

You know there's more to NFTs than Bored Apes, right? Look at the stuff Beeple was doing before NFTs hit the mainstream. NFT was about the art before it became a get rich quick thing. Still is if you ignore Yuga Labs and people like them.

I did write that in my other comment. I was just abbreviating here. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38172108

Why insane? An asset with a value that can be arbitrarily manipulated in a plausibly deniable fashion is extraordinary useful for money laundering and tax avoidance.

I disagree. They're generally not intended as art or consumed as art. Performance art, modern art, post-modern art, avant-garde art - while not always to everyone's taste - is usually intended in a purely artistic sense. (And in my opinion much of it actually is good. Jackson Pollock was regarded as nonsense or non-art and still is by many but he's one of my favorites, for example.)

NFTs that start themselves as NFTs, like Bored Ape NFTs, are a solely financial product intended to convey status and something to eventually be pawned off to others for a profit. It's a market, not an art community. Not all artists who sell things they make as NFTs necessarily fit this mold, but things like Bored Apes definitely do.

I'm sure there's plenty of art and artists who are very aware of themselves being used as tools in a status game.

See eg https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2022/apr/14/receipt...

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