What's the Point about Non-Digital Art Converted into NFT?

NFT (non-fungible token)'s ecosystem is very similar to that of an online game. In an online game, the player should accumulate 'items' that many other players also have or try to have. He also should strive to acquire the items of high popularity ahead of other players. Having such items is not only the road to success in the online game, but also the source of pride and high status in the online game environment. Those items have any degree of worth in that game environment only. Once you quit the game and get out of that virtual world, those items are absolutely of no value.

NFT is exactly in the same nature as online game items. The only difference is that the relevant virtual world for NFT is a metaverse, an integrated network of 3D virtual worlds, rather than a particular online game setting. So, the size of the relevant virtual world may be expanded for NFT, but it is still virtual. In this world, people are jockeying to draw more attention of and exercise more influence on other participants. The participants will need some items that are recognized by other participants to be valuable. And here is the reason for existence for NFT. NFT is madly promoted by the high rollers in the art market, and that push actually produces a yield because the participants in the metaverse want the means to display their prestigious standing vis-a-vis others. NFT operates just like the game items in the online game world. No surprise that the companies that are most interested in NFT markets are online game companies.

Although NFT is promoted as if it could represent an encrypted ownership of an artwork (image), the truth is that NFT cannot contain an image inside it. NFT is based on the same technology as the crypto currencies, and this technology cannot encrypt such a large amount of data as a high-quality image. What NFT can encrypt is a very small amount of data mainly concerning the location of the image (because the image exists only in the online world, the location means a web address) and the identity of the owner and the specifics of purchase such as date. Many experts in NFT agree that NFT is like a receipt of purchase and actually is nothing more than that.

Because NFT itself cannot contain an image inside it, the image itself must exist somewhere else in the web, which means that the image must be hosted by someone else. If the hosting entity ceases to host the image in the web (for example, the company closes down their online business), the image at the designated web address disappears. NFT can't do anything about it. Further, because NFT is just like a receipt, i.e., mere evidence of purchase, it cannot prevent the previous owner from selling it to another. It is another matter that you may bring a lawsuit for the double transfer. But the bottom line doesn't change: NFT itself has no inherent guarantee that it can prevent double transfer and other forms of cheating.

For all the limitations of NFT, it may have to be admitted that no one should find fault with creating a digital art and selling it in a digital format. The digital artworks are hosted by a company in the web and the artworks are being sold by means of NFT. That should sound fine, except that there is still a question why people are so willing to transform the Internet, previously a world of free resources, into a realm where they cannot surf without bumping into someone's proprietary interests. But, in my view, some of the silliest moves in the recent art market are concerned with conversion of non-digital art to a digital format for selling in NFT. Some of those artists do so because they aren't known in the market yet and they can't afford a physical space for exhibiting their works. That's fully understandable. But, more bizarre trends in the recent art market are by those artists who already have earned enough fame and market recognition. They do conversion of their physical artworks into NFT simply to hop on the NFT bandwagon, to earn a bigger money in a shorter time with far more ease and convenience (unlike a physical artwork, an artwork in digital format, once created, can be sold in multiple 'editions').

Tae Im HA, Un Passage, No.201001, 112x193, Acrylic on Canvas, 2020

A digital art is totally different from a physical, non-digital art. When you take a photo of a physical art, that 2D color-pixeled printing paper cannot be equal to the real artwork. The real artwork is not an image. It is a presence in the physical dimension. The canvas, its texture, its specific material characteristics are part of the physical presence. The surface of a painting, full of the material characteristics of the paints, their depths and movements, cannot be reduced into a flat printing paper. We enjoy the images of paintings not because the images can replace the actual paintings but because the images are the only alternatives for many of us. In a digital art, there are no physical canvas and no physical paints. The only materials in which a digital art can exist are the numbers 0 and 1.

I am also a digital artist. I use digital art because digital art provides the creation experience uniquely possible in the digital environment only. I respect such uniqueness of the digital art and enjoy it much. But I do never try to lump together digital art and non-digital art and equalize them. The current art market attempts to consecrate that unbecoming mutual conversion between the two in the name of NFT. David Hockney, one of the most revered living artists in our age, said that NFT is I.C.S. “International crooks and swindlers.” This hard judgment makes sense not only because NFT is merely a fashionable receipt of purchase and is never a vehicle to hold an image itself, but also because the current art market's push to turn everything into NFT is just a madness.

For example, Tae Im HA, an acrylic painting artist in Korea, already has an established brand name and popularity in the physical art market. Her paintings typically consist of many colored bands, which look like this:

Now, this artist wants to sell her artworks in NFT. As is often the case with many artists who convert their physical artworks into NFT, Tae Im HA too tries to incorporate certain 'motion' elements in her converted versions to attract more interests of the potential buyers. The converted art now looks like the above YouTube video.

I like Tae Im HA's artworks because her bright colored acrylic paintings have unique and pleasant compositions that make the best use of the characteristics of acrylic paints. Her paintings have charms that instantly cheer up the mood of the space. But the converted art form as seen in the video above looks just silly. Indeed, some say that the more silly it looks, the better it sells in NFT.

A fragment of “EVERYDAYS: THE FIRST 5000 DAYS” by Beeple. Source: A screenshot, onlineonly.christies.com

When asked about Beeple's NFT work "Everydays: The First 5000 Days" which was sold for a crazy price of USD 69 million, Hockney said, “I saw the pictures, but I mean it just looked like silly little things ... I couldn’t make out what it was, actually.” (For more, see https://observer.com/2021/04/david-hockney-nfts-beeple/)

When I see the frenzy of the NFT art market and the artists and the galleries that plunge themselves into it headlong, I often feel the same. Fine art and digital art are separate art forms. They cannot be equalized.