Jon Devo column
Jon Devo delves into the murky world of buying digital art with cryptocurrency
Will NFTs really create a compelling new market for photographers?
“It’s the digital equivalent of writing ‘I woz ’ere’ in a lavatory”
You may have heard news stories about the rise of digital art selling for millions as Non-Fungible Tokens, better known as NFTs. But what is an NFT? How are artists selling their work digitally for such incredible sums of money? And could NFTs be a serious revenue stream for photographers?
NFTs are at the heart of the latest digital gold rush. But whenever there’s a gold rush, sceptics like me want to know where the danger is before we head in any direction.
Why NFT?
It could be argued that Mike Winkelmann, also known as digital artist Beeple, put NFTs on the map when one of his creations sold for $69 million, as part of an auction held by Christie’s in March 2021. Beeple is talented and has over 2.5 million followers online, which translated into plenty of hype. The added credibility of Christie’s made it a global news story.
Attention-grabbing headlines about digital art selling for millions of dollars have caught the attention of some photographers. Jesse Frohman was the last photographer to conduct a photoshoot with the late Nirvana frontman Kurt Cobain. Announcing an NFT sale of the photos, Frohman tweeted: “The LastSession NFT drop is an artistic exploration into the ways evolving forms of media and technology can be used to keep a legend like Cobain alive.” Sounds great – but what are people buying?
NFTs are digital assets that are assigned a unique cryptographic key, which points to a blockchain address, along with a URL or other identifying information. People paying for NFTs don’t own anything, except the right to say they own that particular virtual item. NFT ownership doesn’t convey any legal ownership over the original work, or reassign copyright to the NFT owner to make any royalties from the original work. It’s the digital equivalent of writing “I woz ’ere” in a building’s lavatory, and telling someone you
own the place – except you paid real sums of money for the right to do so.
So why are some photographers keen to get in on the trend? Perhaps some of the attraction lies in the fact that for too long photographers have struggled to protect the use of our images online. And frankly, many of us could do with the money (and recognition). But the knock-on effect of wild success stories is that others will jump on the bandwagon, in search of life-changing sums of money.
However, it’s not uncommon in the art or finance worlds for conspirators to drive up the value of an asset. This encourages others to throw their money down a well, hoping to benefit from an artificially inflated craze. And that could very well be what’s going on in the world of NFTs.
In order to list your work as an NFT, you have to ‘mint’ it. This means converting real-world money into cryptocurrency so that you can pay a fee, in order to attach a blockchain code to your image. Then you have to hope that someone is willing to pay to say they own a digital copy of it.
I hope I’m not putting you off the idea of selling your photos as NFTs because it sounds complicated. I’d rather put you off the idea because it’s a very effective trap to pump cryptocurrency value, by enticing more people to buy into it with realworld money. It could be the case that a few people at the top who run crypto exchanges will continue to get very rich, while the rest of us fund their wallets and hope for a rare overspill of magic virtual money. This is not financial advice, but think about it.