The combination of non-fungible token (NFT) with paintings, music, games, videos and other forms of creative content is an innovation to protect the copyright of authors. It digitizes physical works with unique labels. At present, the NFT industry is blooming in the area of digital collections in China, attracting increasingly more artists, art collectors and platform enterprises to interact. However, the NFT digital collection platform is facing challenges and growth limitations. This study adopts the theory framework of responsible innovation. Through semi-structured interview and secondary document review, it analyzes the positive and negative effects of China’s NFT digital collections alongside technological, economical, ethical and social dimensions. The paper proposes four development paths to achieve responsible innovation of this emerging new business. Further discussion links NFT with open innovation dynamics, alongside areas for future research.
The efforts and talents of Nigerian creative artists have not turned into proportionate economic benefits. However, Non-Fungible Tokens (NFT) and their marketplaces are causing a revolution in the gaming, literature, art and music industries. Despite these opportunities, NFTs hold, of concern is the effectiveness, awareness and risks it poses to Nigerian visual art stakeholders. Through a triangular method, data was collected, analysed and discussed utilising media economics and the diffusion of innovation theories. A total of 28 stakeholders, predominantly artists, including art collectors and copyright regulators, showed that early adopters in Nigeria consider NFT marketplaces for showcasing and selling digital artworks. Notwithstanding, this trust is not seen when it comes to copyright-ability. The study also showcases various policy, structural and economic issues limiting Nigerian art space besides technology adoption. Nigerian creatives must keep an eye on the evolution of NFTs to aid their sustainable growth. Although pirated creative works have been sold on the streets of Nigeria over the years, NFTs can help Nigerian creatives earn on the streets of the metaverse.
Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs) are crypto assets with a unique digital identifier for ownership, powered by blockchain technology. Technically speaking, anything digital could be minted and sold as an NFT, which provides proof of ownership and authenticity of a digital file. For this reason, it helps us distinguish between the originals and their copies, making it possible to trade them. This paper focuses on art NFTs that change how artists can sell their products. It also changes how the art trade market works since NFT technology cuts out the middleman. Recently, the utility of NFTs has become an essential issue in the NFT ecosystem, which refers to the owners' usefulness, profitability, and benefits. Using recent major art NFT marketplace datasets, we summarize and interpret the current market trends and patterns in a way that brings insight into the future art market. Numerical examples are presented.
Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs) have recently surged to mainstream attention by allowing the exchange of digital assets via blockchains. NFTs have also been adopted by artists to sell digital art. One of the promises of NFTs is broadening participation to the art market, a traditionally closed and opaque system, to sustain a wider and more diverse set of artists and collectors. A key sign of this effect would be the disappearance or at least reduction in importance of seller-buyer preferential ties, whereby the success of an artist is strongly dependent on the patronage of a single collector. We investigate NFT art seller-buyer networks considering several galleries and a large set of nearly 40,000 sales for over 230 M USD in total volume. We find that NFT art is a highly concentrated market driven by few successful sellers and even fewer systematic buyers. High concentration is present in both the number of sales and, even more strongly, in their priced volume. Furthermore, we show that, while a broader-participation market was present in the early phase of NFT art adoption, preferential ties have dominated during market growth, peak and recent decline. We consistently find that the top buyer accounts on average for over 80% of buys for a given seller. Similar trends apply to buyers and their top seller. We conclude that NFT art constitutes, at the present, a highly concentrated market driven by preferential seller-buyer ties.
Depending on your perspective, Non-Fungible Token (NFT) artworks are inaugurating an exciting new chapter in the history of art, or a dangerous new chapter in the history of online market bubbles. NFTs index artworks, and are typically strings of characters stored on a blockchain such as Ethereum. NFTs are not exclusively used to index artworks, and have been used to index a range of collectibles, but it is the sale of NFTs associated with artworks that has launched the phenomenon into public consciousness. Perhaps the most famous example of this is the digital artist Beepleâs sale of an NFT for the equivalent of $69 million (Krastrenakes). For some, such staggering prices suggest NFTs are poised to become the next Beanie Babiesâi.e., commodities without utility that sell at vastly inflated prices. Despite such cynicism, some argue that NFTs have revolutionary technical import, such that they could overturn many common and unequal practices within the contemporary art market (Rennie et al.). Chief among these is the supposed disposability of digital artworks, which are viewed as difficult to sell, resell, and protect from piracy. Such issues are thought to be ameliorated by NFTs, since they function as a token that is understood to stand as a âdefinitive indicator of ownershipâ of digital artworks (Mackenzie and BÄrziĆa 2). Or, as Rachel OâDwyer has summarised, NFT art auctions like the Ethereal Summit held in New York in 2018 allow individuals to bid for the âownership and provenance details of the works of art encrypted in the Ethereum blockchain and represented by a tokenâ (OâDwyer). Unlike a more conventional artwork, such as a painting, NFT artworks typically take the form of JPEGs or GIFs, and therefore circulate the Internet widely, regardless of who owns the token that designates ownership. While reproductions and printed documentations of traditional artworks are commonplaceâe.g., art gallery giftshops will often sell relatively low-cost posters of masterpieces like Picassoâs Guernica, or coffee table books showcasing the masterworks of influential movements like post-impressionismâthere are obvious material differences between the reproduction and the original. In the case of the typically digital NFT artworks, this distinction does not apply. Accordingly, the academic and popular discussions that surround NFT artworks have reignited theoretical questions around the ontological status of artworks, and the source of their economic value. For some, the NFT market is a financial bubble and the prices attracted by particular NFT-linked artworks have no underlying value (BBC News). For others, the value of NFTs can be explained through an appeal to the value subjectively attributed to the image or animation by the purchaser (Nguyen), while for others the value of NFTs should be understood in terms of digital scarcity and provenance (Rennie et al.; Joselit) or as a technological means for artists to maintain a greater share of their artworkâs value (Kugler). While the NFT market is novel, and is worthy of study in terms of its specific technological and economic forms, this article will argue that NFTs can be placed in a longer history of the emergence of what Luc Boltanski and Arnauld Esquerre have called the âenrichment economyâ. In their Enrichment: A Critique of Commodities, Boltanski and Esquerre argue that, since at least the last quarter of the twentieth century, a new site of valorisation has emerged in post-industrial economies. According to Boltanski and Esquerre, globalisation and deindustrialisation provoked many economies to embrace tourism, luxury good production, and the commodification of heritage and culture as new sites of extraction. As the viability of the mass production of commodities has receded, the production of unique commodities and transient yet âunforgettableâ experiences have become more economically significant. For Boltanski and Esquerre, enrichment refers both to the often-discursive refining and redefining of existing commoditiesâsuch that they fetch greater pricesâand a greater emphasis on an economy for those with disposable incomeâsuch as tourists, art collectors, and the wealthy more generally (3-4). Often, Boltanski and Esquerre argue, the enrichment economies of art and luxury tend to mine and exploit the âunderlying substratum that is purely and simply the pastâ (2). For this reason, the enrichment economy requires the production of new forms of authenticity, âauraâ, and belief, such that the overlooked or taken-for-granted objects of the past can be reframed as unique and worthy of investment or consumption. The interesting question, then, is not necessarily that of why someone would pay a large sum of money to own a piece of code on a blockchain, but, instead, that of how a particular piece of contemporary art or an NFT comes to be âenrichedâ with authenticity and aura. While a thoroughgoing discussion of this topic would require a longer piece, this article will nevertheless attempt to open up connections between art history, debates around the production of artistic value during and after Modernism, and the newly emerging NFT art market. While many have declared that NFTs are âdisrupting the art marketâ (Tripathi)âsupposedly evinced by the staggering growth of the NFT market, and emerging institutional recognition, such as ArtReviewâs decision to place an NFT at the top of their Power 100 List for 2021âthis article seeks to locate the NFT explosion within a slightly longer timeframe, one in which NFTs would feature as a continuationâalbeit a non-linear oneârather than a disruption of ongoing cultural and economic logics. Value and Void Despite the incredulity that commonly meets NFT artworks, the contemporary art market similarly flaunts conventional understandings of aesthetic and economic value. While many would surely agree with journalist Amy Castorâs claim that âitâs hard to justify that a Bored Ape NFT is worth $300,000 based on the artâ (quoted in Artnet), almost identical criticisms have been raised around the contemporary artist Maurizio Cattelanâs 2019 work Comedian. Released in an edition of three, Comedian consisted of a banana duct-taped to a wall, with two of the three selling for $120,000 each. As Sara Callahan puts it, works like Comedian reignited debates around âwhat makes something a high-priced artwork when another, seemingly identical, object is not?â (Callahan). While NFTs are reawakening interest in the question of artistic value, the financialisation of cheaply made and mass-produced artworks has a much longer history. Indeed, by the 1960s, a booming secondary art market that traded in increasingly expensive, yet cheap-to-produce avant-garde worksâoften requiring relatively small amounts of time and inexpensive materialsâraised suspicions that art was becoming indistinguishable from more traditional financial assets. In response, in 1968 the influential art critic Leo Steinberg argued that, âavant-garde art, lately Americanized, is for the first time associated with big money. ⊠Another decade, and we shall have mutual funds based on securities in the form of pictures held in bank vaultsâ (quoted in Beech 300). As Dave Beech has shown, in the ensuing period, âartâs relationship to finance capital has outstripped Steinbergâs worst fearsâ (Beech 301). By the 1980s, banks allowed individuals to borrow large sums of money against the value of their art collections, and investment in artworks became a normal practice of portfolio diversification (Beech 299â300). When interest rates are low, investments in productive capital offer low levels of liquidity, and international markets appear vulnerable to shocks, artworksâwhether physical or in the form of an NFTâoffer a means of hedging against future losses. Furthermore, in both the contemporary art market and the NFT market, purchases of artworks at inflated prices often allow an individual to prevent âthe bottom from falling out of a market they have already invested inâ (OâDwyer). The fact that artworks could hold a value well in excess of the cost of the materials or labour time required to produce them, was not solely recognised by art collectors and investors. Instead, this period saw a great number of artists explicitly playing with the aporia that had emerged around artâs economic valueâinsofar as ready-made artworks could now fetch prices typically reserved for laboriously produced and unique masterpieces. Take, for example, Yves Kleinâs project Zones of Immaterial Pictorial Sensibility, which he developed over the late 1950s and early 1960s. In these works, Klein offered collectors the opportunity to purchase a void or âimmaterial zoneâ for varying quantities of gold, with â20 grams (3/4 ounce) of pure gold for the Zones of series no. 1, the least expensive, to 1,280 grams (27/8 pounds) for those of series no. 7, the most expensiveâ (Cras 24). In exchange for the gold, the void-owner would receive a receipt as proof of purchase. However, for the work to be completed, Klein requested that the receipt be burned by the collector, and in response Klein would throw half of the received gold into the river Seine (Cras 24). By destroying the proof of purchase, and by releasing some of the gold into the river, the collector would receive âthe full authentic immaterial value of the workâ (Klein quoted in Cras 24). We see some resemblances here between Kleinâs Zones and NFTsâand here Klein is no exception, since, as Cras has documented, the 1960s were replete with artists experimenting with the production of artworks as novel financial assets. For Cras, it was a time in which âthe problem of attaching a price to works of art and offering them for sale, traditionally considered to be external to creation in this domain, was now incorporated in artistic practiceâ (Cras 3). If artists were increasingly embracing the artworkâs status as an asset, and if the price of artworks became divorced
We are witnessing the emergence of a new digital art market, the art market 3.0. Blockchain technology has taken on a new sector which is still not well known, Non-Fungible tokens (NFT). In this paper we propose a new methodology to build a NFT Price Index that represents this new market on the whole. In addition, this index will allow us to have a look on the dynamics and performances of NFT markets, and to diagnose them.
This research is descriptive research to find out the symptoms or effects of aesthetics and public perception of the popular artworks of the NFT (non-fungible token) Marketplace.The NFT marketplace has begun to gain popularity among Indonesians since the virality of Ghozali who managed to sell his artwork in the form of selfie photos on the NFT Opensea Marketplace, earning billions of rupiah in profits at the end of 2021.Of empirical interest is the potential reasons why some artworks on the NFT Marketplace are prized highly compared to other works.There are two aspects of the study discussed in this study, namely aesthetics and public perception.This study aims to descriptively examine aesthetics and public perceptions of popular artworks at the NFT Opensea Marketplace; examine and investigate the things that affect the popularity of artwork on the NFT Opensea Marketplace from the aesthetic aspect and public perception.Findings reveal that the aesthetic perception of the public, seeing the popularity of NFT artwork is influenced by several factors, including: (1) people's perspectives on what makes something "unique", (2) influenced by the medium of introduction, (3) the popularity of the work is influenced by its aesthetic value, and (4) the popularity of NFT artworks is determined by the context.
2021, as the first year of the development of the Non-Fungible Token (NFT), has formed a wide impact on the development of the cultural industry in all aspects. This paper will compare and analyze the Jingtan and Opensea platforms through qualitative and quantitative methods, and at the same time analyze the correlation between Alibaba's U.S. stock data, Poly Culture Group's Hong Kong stock data, and Jingtan platform user data, as well as the correlation between Facebook's U.S. stock data and Opensea platform user data, to deduce the difference and correlation between foreign NFTs in promoting the development of cultural industries and domestic NFT industry phenomena and put forward the suggestion that China should use policies to escort NFT with eliminating policy risks, to motivate more companies to invest in NFT. In this case, the Chinese government can promote the development of China's cultural industry and enhance China's soft power.
Social goods are difficult to study because of selection bias, as available data typically focus on successful products. The non-fungible token (NFT) market offers a rare exception, as the blockchain records every launch, success, and failure. Using comprehensive NFT data from 2021â2024, we study preference-driven herding in primary markets. Launch outcomes are sharply bimodal, demand accelerates as sellouts approach, and early participation shocks persist for months. These patterns are consistent with preference-driven coordination rather than purely informational herding. We provide further evidence consistent with social-goods models, including substantial primary-market underpricing that is exploited by scalpers.
While the traditional art market stagnates, the digital art market is booming partially due to its connection with non-fungible tokens, which allow any unique goods to be mapped in a digital environment. Using unique individual data from the online art NFTs marketplace SuperRare, we combine econometric tools with recent machine learning approaches. This approach allows us to define explanatory variables out of the NFTs descriptions for our Hedonic pricing approach. Using these variables, we are able to show that our Hedonic pricing models exhibit relevant informational value for NFTs prices. Moreover, we show that NFTs cannot be viewed as a simple derivative of cryptocurrencies.
Mr.Vimu Ram Kale Kale, Chandrani Singh, Dr.Sunil Khilari
Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTâs) indicate the creation of a blockchain-based digital certificate of authenticity that is comparable to other virtual crypto assets and currencies. The use of blockchain technology and the exchange of digital currency have become increasingly widespread in recent years. Having said that, as has been shown in recent years, the NFT market is also booming. The very idea of NFT is derived from an Ethereum token standard that aims to separate and recognise each token with its distinct signature being tied with digital attributes. India has also seen increased interest in this digital sector, particularly from the future new-age investors and digital innovators, as a result of the spectacular return on its quickly expanding global market. However, due to the early stage of the NFT ecosystem's growth, India lacks a regulatory legislative framework to oversee such immature digital crypto assets. There are several legal complexities surrounding them, which has made it difficult to determine their legal legitimacy and sanctity. New artists could have a tendency to become lost in this chaotic growth in the absence of comprehensive descriptions. This paper aims to examine the idea of NFT in comparison to bitcoin and copyright, as well as its operational and technological elements. It attempts to examine the legal hazards that affect its operation as well as the potential and difficulties the Indian legal system has with regard to crypto-assets.
La pandemia ha definito diverse declinazioni della liveness nella dimensione digitale. Tra i settori piĂč colpiti e che hanno dovuto reinventare linguaggi e forme comunicative, accanto al teatro quello della musica live (il tema disciplinare sul quale vogliamo riflettere). Lâindustria musicale, da sempre fortemente legata alla prossimitĂ fisica, al necessario rapporto con la strada, inteso come luogo dâispirazione e nutrimento (immaginiamo le subculture giovanili: dai teddy boys, ai mods, dal movimento hippie, al punk, dallâhip hop alla trap) si Ăš tenacemente reinventata negli ultimi anni negli innovativi spazi digitali: dai social network ai concerti sui videogames (sperimentando un nuovo modo di comunicare e dando vita ad un rinnovato immaginario). Attraverso questo saggio si intende procedere verso una ricognizione e analisi delle pratiche della liveness multimediali, transmediali, intermediali nellâambito musicale esaminando, in particolare, come gli NFT musicali (Non Fungible Tokens) si siano rivelati come una delle strade piĂč promettenti per continuare a mantenere il legame emotivo, culturale ed identitario tra i performer e i fans. E gettando le basi per unâeconomia alternativa futura.
The âfinancialisationâ of art has transformed art from an object of aesthetic expression to an instrument of increasing wealth, in turn increasing the likelihood of forgery. Art fraud harms artists, purchasers, museums, and society at large. Ultimately, the integrity of the art industry is at stake. The culture of secrecy and questionable auction practices widen the information asymmetry contributing to market failure in the art market. Multiple approaches are needed to address these challenges. The criminalisation of art fraud faces evidential difficulties of proof beyond reasonable doubt. The more accessible threshold of proving misleading conduct under s 18 of the Australian Consumer Law has been successfully invoked by artists against the forger, a purchaser against an auction house, and the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission obtaining pecuniary penalties and restraint orders against art offenders. Besides imposing presumptive liability on auction houses, authentication boards and a Code of Conduct for Art Merchants will promote transparency in the art market.
The creative economy has attracted increasing attention from academia and policymakers for more than two decades. However, despite the flourishing literature on this topic, its complex connection with development and its role in strengthening resilience are yet to be properly examined. The paper addresses this issue by investigating how different cities in Romania, with a different intensity of creative industries, have managed to resist and to recover from the aftermath of the Great Recession. Our findings reveal that, as a whole, creative industries strengthen urban resistance against a recession, but do not necessarily fasten urban recovery. As our results suggest, this might be due to the asymmetrical impact across different groups of creative industries. Besides a creative economy proliferation, other factors are also identified as significant resilience drivers. Whilst a better access to healthcare services, higher local investments and a higher decentralization of local budgets appear to enhance the citiesâ resistance, higher shares of agriculture and finance, as well as a higher income per capita appear to correlate with a faster urban recovery.
Blockchain is usually associated with cryptocurrencies. However, as a distributed ledger technology, it can have many other applications. For example, blockchain can bring changes to how the art market operates. It can be utilised for many types of digital transactions, including collection, authentication, tracking of provenance, and sharing ownership of artworks. \nThis main purpose of this thesis is to provide perspectives on how and in what areas blockchain could be used to change the art market. It also examines how this technology may shift the balance of powers in the art market. The thesis further explores opportunities and challenges when using blockchain technology in the art market. \nThe thesis utilises a narrative thematic literature research methodology and includes a qualitative analysis of blockchain technology. Due to the nature and novelty of this technology, the reviewed literature covers a different range of disciplines, in which blockchain can be utilised. The findings were extrapolated to the use of blockchain technology in the art market. \nThe results demonstrate that blockchain can increase the speed, transparency, and volume of art sales worldwide and democratise the sector so that artists, collectors, and spectators can benefit from this technology. A blockchain platform can coexist with other traditional applications. However, before implementing this technology, we may need to overcome technological, governance, organisational, and societal barriers.
When Satoshi Nakamoto released Bitcoin in 2009, the world became aware of blockchain technology, but cryptocurrency is just one of the applications that can be powered by blockchain technology. Blockchain technology2 is a distributed database where many copies of the data are replicated and synchronized. Don Tapscott (2016) describes the blockchain as âan incorruptible digital ledger of economic transactions that can be programmed to record not just financial transactions but virtually everything of value. [...] Blockchain differs from traditional ledgers of transactions in that it is decentralized, public and encrypted.â3Technology is becoming an integral part of creating, displaying, signing, and selling art. How is blockchain involved in the cycle of a work of art?In the following interview with Ruth Catlow (London, 1968), artist-theorist, curator, and co-founder and Artistic Director of Furtherfield4 and DECAL5(Decentralised Arts Lab), reflects on blockchainâs6 place in the art world and the importance of decentralized structures in art and economics. Focussing on critical investigations of digital and networked technologies and their emancipatory potential, she offers interesting insights into new economies, and suggests concepts for alternative ways to create new art practices.
The paper addresses the issue of digitalization of the contemporary art market. It analyzes key features of todayâs online art market and discusses three technological innovationsâcryptocurrency, blockchain, and artificial intelligenceâthat have the potential to contribute to the further development and growth of online art trade. The paper demonstrates that whereas cyberspace attracts new talent and great business ideas intended to make global art commerce more versatile and efficient, online art market players alongside with providers of online art market data and analytics offer interesting avenues of future research in this sector.
After a general campaign that aimed at changing the political and socioeconomic system, the 15M/Indignados abandoned the visible occupation of central squares decentralized through neighborhood assemblies, and specialized around different issues, such as housing, and the health and public education systems. Although often cohabitating amid tension, feminist activists of different generations forged internal and autonomous spaces that prioritized feminist aspirations and permeated dissent in the shadow of the Great Recession, sharing arenas with people who would not have been reached otherwise. Despite the feminist movement(s)â heterogeneity, intersectional character, and organization through polycephalous networks, it has in recent times grown to stand out as the movement with the highest mobilization capacity in the country. Based on original qualitative data from 12 semi-structured interviews with key informants and activists, the piece of research sheds light on the tensions between different generations of feminists. It will explain the continuities and discontinuities between veteran and younger activistsâ world views when it comes to their forms of politicization, theoretical underpinnings, strategic priorities, organizational configuration and resource mobilization, repertoires of action and cultural foundations. In addition, it contends that the ability of veteran and new activists to forge arenas of encounter, fostering debate and synergies during the antiausterity cycle of protest, were key to account for the cross-generational alliance-building processes, which have hitherto seldom been explored in the feminist movement(s) and beyond.
Overview:Industries that rely on digital payments (especially micro-transactions) and complex contracting between parties stand to gain the most from the arrival of blockchain technology. In addition, the ability to authenticate a work as it passes from one buyer to the next, and to generate unique digital works, will be a boon to those industries where scarcity is valued. We conclude that the creative industries would benefit greatly from this new economic infrastructure – possibly more than any other segment of the economy. However, the embryonic blockchain-enabled creative economy has a difficult road ahead. Old industry incumbents and new technology platforms alike have failed to demonstrate a willingness to embrace an open and accessible ‘internet of value’ (as blockchain is known). Without concerted efforts to coordinate practitioners and stakeholders (arts organisations, creative firms, funding bodies, collecting societies and others), including shared digital infrastructures and open standards, these benefits may never be realised. We propose what we are calling an ‘industry utility’ approach to cultural policy. An industry utility is a shared infrastructure built to support and grow a segment of the economy. In this scenario, Australia’s cultural institutions would cooperate in the development and use of a shared blockchain infrastructure for the creative industries. We provide some initial ideas on what that might look like for creative practitioners and show how such an approach would position Australia as a leader in the creative economy.Highlights:An overview of distributed ledger technology, including smart contracts.Examples of the way experimentation is already taking place with these technologies in the cultural and creative industries (weighted towards the music and screen sectors where most developments have occurred to date).Consideration of the role that Australia’s cultural institutions might play in the development of a creative industries blockchain economy.
The rise of decentralized ledger (bookkeeping) systems that operate as public transaction archives to store value records (such as payments in a cryptocurrency) and maintain consensus about agreements also seems to promise solutions for the problem of scaling trust-based decision-making processes. Once linked almost exclusively to finance (âcryptocurrenciesâ), the âblockchain spaceâ has become a terrain of social and technological experimentation. While these changes are likely to substantially transform the way, we organize our collective actions, few digital content creators; artists, designers, and other actors not directly linked to processes of technological innovation are currently involved. In this essay, we describe how such a co-creative approach to such involvement can be developed through the public prototyping of Spectrum, a blockchain-based tool for digital creators. What we found is that such an approach offers opportunities to more fully comprehend value chains, but also highlights need for co-creation approaches that cut across existing audiences and bring in new actors. This matters because blockchain-based strategies for technology design are about to transform the way we create, share, and cooperate. Given the promise and potential stakes of shifting the creation of digital arts-and-cultural assets to infrastructures based on such distributed ledger technologies, it is crucial that artists and other digital creators engage with the design both of these infrastructures and the systems of governance structuring their operation.