Mark Wilson S. Catindig, Carlo M. Garcia, Robenj Aryiel A. Rustia, Joanna Juvyjoy A. Rojo
Creative industry artists often receive little-to-no appreciation in their careers in the creative industry, until Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs) Art arrived in the Philippines. Even though NFT Art is a new concept, Filipino creative artists quickly joined it, which appears to be opening doors for their careers. The development of the NFT ecosystem in the country is still in its early stage, and as such remains unexamined. With this, five creative industry artists were interviewed regarding their perspectives on participating in NFT Art in the country. This research uses a qualitative and exploratory design as its approach in gathering the perspectives of the creative industry artists on NFT Art in the country. The results indicated that creative industry artists partake in NFT because of its opportunities for career development, but they also revealed poor conditions in existing creative industry careers that need to be addressed. It is therefore recommended that NFT Art be explored more and to include participants from other countries and know their perspectives on the emerging phenomenon.
Este artigo analisa a ideologia, os usos e as implicações do NFT (Non-Fungible Token) para a economia da música. O NFT resgata a ideologia da desintermediação das relações econômicas ao prometer retornos financeiros mais altos ao artista, decorrentes de sua conexão direta com o consumidor. A tecnologia, no entanto, reorienta a carreira dos artistas, bem como sua relação com os fãs. Informado pela filosofia anarcocapitalista, o uso do NFT tem condicionado artistas a verem suas obras como ativos valorizáveis, cabendo aos fãs o papel de investidores. A partir da análise bibliográfica, investigamos: (1) a ideologia da desintermediação na economia da música, (2) a inspiração anarcocapitalista no desenvolvimento de tecnologias financeiras, como o NFT, (3) o uso do NFT no mercado de música e (4) o papel dos fãs em uma economia da música financeirizada. Como conclusão, apontamos como o uso de tecnologias como o NFT faz parte de outro momento da indústria da música que pode ser rotulado como pós-streaming.
The norms and systems of the fashion industry tend to support a small class of brands and designers creating fashion while the public takes on the role of passive consumer. The rise of digital fashion and a new sector of ‘digital-only’ fashion brands now provides unique ways for consumers to interact with fashion online, from buying wearables for digital gaming avatars, to wearing a digital dress on social media, to investing in non-fungible tokens (NFTs) – digital assets based on blockchain technology, bought and sold online. Digital-only fashion brands are reimagining the hierarchical relationships between brand and consumer towards one of empowerment and mutual value via decentralized co-design platforms. Such endeavours allow brands to build community and challenge the ownership and authorship conventions in the fashion industry. Co-design has been widely used by fashion brands as a strategy that promotes involvement from the public/consumer in creating customized and made-to-order products and experiences. Using established theories of participatory art, an approach to making art which engages the public and communities in the creative process, this article explores how digital-only fashion brands are creating more participatory models of fashion co-design. To confirm and further explore this theory and to consider how a participatory model is achieved in practice, a qualitative case study was conducted on The Fabricant Studio, a collaborative digital fashion atelier. The findings reveal new methods of co-design used by digital fashion brands that allow consumers to design and monetize their craft while retaining creators’ ownership. The application of the theory also underscores the importance of creative control and decision-making in the fashion co-design process to ensure it is truly participatory vs. interactive. The Fabricant’s methods to educate users through accessible platforms contribute to the diversification of co-designers and digital fashion designers in general.
<p align="justify">Indonesian Central Agency on Statistics notes the decline of national economic status by 2,07% in 2020 and Dewi, on the same year, reported its effect to the world of art and painting investments. This research carry that problem and tries to look at Non-Fungible Token (NFT) as an advanceable means to increase artists’ economic welfare, especially after the NFT trend at the start of 2022. Specifically, this research focuses on artists found on Braga Street, Bandung City, as a first step in exploring the opportunity of NFT in increasing economic welfare. This article aims to analyze and formulating the potential of NFT in increasing artists’ economic welfare by way of in-depth interview as the main method.</p><p><strong>Key words</strong>: NFT, Local Artists, Bandung, Economic Welfare</p>
The future iteration of the internet is often branded as Web3, claimed to be a decentralising phase of its evolution, a reaction to the centralisation in the Web 2.0 era. This upcoming version of the internet, afforded by distributed ledgers and blockchain technologies, is sometimes also called the "Web of Value". It highlights the expectation that as much of the content and services on the internet get “tokenised”, which enables their trade and related operations of ‘value creation’. It is claimed that as the value of everything on the internet becomes more salient, conditioning new kinds of economic activities, relationships and forms of organising. In this article we discuss these expectations as imaginaries, the implications of which vary based on how they are framed or interpreted by different economic theories. More specifically, the article discusses the interpretations deriving from neoclassical economics, classical economics, heterodox economics and public value theory. We demonstrate significant differences between these interpretations and how they are offering competing imaginaries on the future internet.
Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs) are non-interchangeable assets, usually digital art, which are stored on the blockchain. Preliminary studies find that female and darker-skinned NFTs are valued less than their male and lighter-skinned counterparts. However, these studies analyze only the CryptoPunks collection. We test the statistical significance of race and gender biases in the prices of CryptoPunks and present the first study of gender bias in the broader NFT market. We find evidence of racial bias but not gender bias. Our work also introduces a dataset of gender-labeled NFT collections to advance the broader study of social equity in this emerging market.
Paul Griffiths, Carlos J. Costa, Nuno Fernandes Crespo
Non-fungible tokens (NFTs) represent a multibillion-dollar global market. While considerable speculation exists about the future utility of NFTs, there has been limited research into the consumer behaviors of market participants. This research paper examines the motivations of NFT buyers through the lens of self-determination theory. Using a sample of 482 participants, the authors tested a conceptual framework to better understand both NFT buyers’ intrinsic and extrinsic motivations. This study expands the literature on NFTs in three different ways: i) it is the first study, as far as we know, to focus exclusively on NFT buyers and their motivations in purchasing NFTs; ii) it explores a variety of potential motivations theorized in the literature; and iii) it tests the expected future value of NFTs as both a motivation and as a moderator for NFT buyers. The authors determined that intrinsic motivation had the most substantial effect on purchase intention, and the expectations of NFTs’ future value positively moderated the effect of amotivation on purchase intention. In contrast, high expectations of future value moderated the effect of external regulation on purchase intention. The results suggest that NFT buyers are not as impacted by potential social or monetary gain as often characterized in the academic literature but behave more like traditional buyers of luxury goods.
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Consumer Behavior in Brand Consumption and Identification
Since the emerge of NFT artworks in 2019, countless users have begun to flood the NFT trading market. As a non-fungible token, NFT not only provides a new art form, but also can provide a new way for the copyright protection of current artworks. This paper will choose literature analyzing method and comparative analysis method. A detailed analysis will be given to explain the operation and related copyright protection of mainstream NFT trading platforms at home and abroad. Combined with the analysis of actual domestic NFT transactions and the situation of copyright protection, from the three levels of law, technology and management, this paper proposes countermeasures and suggestions for digital art copyright management and protection which based on NFT, that is, non-fungible tokens. We expect to analyze the mainstream NFT trading platforms at home and abroad comprehensively and objectively, summarize their characteristics and commonalities, enrich the application of NFT in the field of copyright protection, provide reference opinions for the construction of the domestic NFT copyright protection environment, and promote the development and prosperity of the cultural industry.
The growing popularity of non-fungible tokens (NFTs) has created a new digital collectibles asset class and market. NFTs are unique digital tokens built on blockchain technology that can represent anything from art, property rights, certificates of authentication to sports collectibles. The use of blockchain provides the framework for digital ownership and brings the notion of scarcity to the digital NFT asset class. With the emerging NFT market and growing consumer base little work has investigated the factors behind NFT interest and participation. Using a dataset of 26,444 tweets on NBA Top Shot, one of the largest and most popular NFT platforms for digital sport collectibles, we use exploratory data and content analysis to generate insights from NFT Twitter messages. Our results suggest that both hedonic and utilitarian factors are driving NFT tweets and should be considered by NFT platforms to encourage participation. Our results show that consumer messages on NFTs are based on the ability to demonstrate ownership, compete against other collectors, provide personal enjoyment and for the opportunity to receive financial returns. This research is one of the first to examine the factors exploring NFT Twitter messages and our results provide early insights for practitioners and academics interested in exploring NFT digital collectibles.
This article examines whether the Resale Royalty Right for Visual Artists Act 2009 (Cth) provides adequate protections for artists working with non-fungible tokens (NFTs). Focussing on Indigenous Australian artists and the context within which they work, the article assesses whether smart contracts embedded in NFTs provide more secure access to royalties for visual artists, as compared with the Act. The article then considers how the Act can be reformed to provide more comprehensive protections that meet the needs of Indigenous Australian artists working with NFTs.
Annoncés comme une révolution pour le monde de la culture et son financement, les Non Fungible Tokens (NFT) sont encore au stade de promesse propice aux spéculations. La régulation du secteur se fait par l’intégration de ce nouvel actif dans l’ordre réglementaire et sa réappropriation partielle par les acteurs traditionnels du monde de l’art.
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.
A cultura do <em>drop</em>, o uso da lógica da escassez artificial no lançamento de produtos de consumo, vem transformando o mercado de arte digital com artistas que utilizam das mesmas táticas de marketing para atrair atenção do público e de potenciais compradores. As criptomoedas e os Tokens Não-Fungíveis (NFTs), possibilitaram uma alternativa de comercialização de obras de arte fora do tradicional mercado de arte. A explosão de interesse por NFTs de arte, principalmente entre 2020 e 2021, serviu de combustível para estimular a especulação financeira do mercado de arte digital e a disseminação de trabalhos de qualidade duvidosa. Atualmente vivemos uma desaceleração desse fenômeno, e a redução na atividade econômica do mercado de criptomoedas. Esse artigo procura compreender o fenômeno dos NFTs de arte, a partir da lógica da escassez artificial e como elas se conectam com estratégias de marketing ligadas a cultura do <em>drop</em>. <strong>Palavras-chave: </strong>arte, escassez digital, NFT, cultura do drop. <em>The drop culture, the use of artificial scarcity logic in the launch of consumer products, has been transforming the digital art market with artists who use the same marketing tactics to attract the attention of the public and potential buyers. Cryptocurrencies and Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs) have made possible an alternative for the commercialization of works of art outside the traditional art market. The explosion of interest in art NFTs, particularly between 2020 and 2021, served as fuel to stimulate financial speculation in the digital art market and the spread of work of dubious quality. Currently, we're experiencing a slowdown in this phenomenon and a reduction in economic activity in the cryptocurrency market. This article seeks to understand the phenomenon of art NFTs, from the logic of artificial scarcity and how they connect with marketing strategies linked to the drop culture.</em> <strong><em>Keywords: </em></strong><em>art, digital scarcity, NFT, drop culture.</em>
본 연구는 블록체인기술을 이용한 NFT(Non-Fungible Token)와 이를 활용하여 창작되어진 NFT아트에 나타나는 작품들에 대한 기호학적 분석을 통해 이미지의 의미작용과 상징성을 고찰하였으며, NFT아트의 미학적 근거와 예술로서의 가치를 밝히는 접근방법을 제시하였다.이를 위해 새로운 미디어 환경에서의 디지털아트의 매체적 특징을 분석하고, NFT아트의 예술적 세계관과 미술 시장의 지형변화를 알아보았다. 또한 NFT아트의 이미지를 하나의 시각적 기호와 상징으로 보고 기호학적 관점에서 의미작용 과정을 거쳐 디지털아트가 시각적 커뮤니케이션의 영역에서 예술로 전환되는 과정을 연구하였다.시각예술에 있어서 소비자인 관객들에게 전달하고자 하는 이미지의 메시지는 미학적 영역에서 미적코드를 담고 있는데, 이미지의 다양한 미적코드를 이용하여 자의적인 시각언어의 의미전달과 <가치의 재창출 시스템>이라는 본래의 메시지를 전달하는 과정을 보여주고자 하였다.NFT아트는 미적코드의 메시지가 담긴 시각기호를 의미작용을 통해 서로를 식별하고 소유하는 예술적 생태계로 확장하고 있으며, 이러한 시각적 소통과정을 통해 NFT아트의 새로운 예술적 개연성을 제안하고 NFT아트가 다양한 형식과 내용의 발전을 거듭하며 뉴미디어환경에서의 새로운 시각콘텐츠의 가능성을 제시하고자 하였다.
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.
Impulsada por algunas ventas extraordinarias, la fiebre de los NFT, esos títulos de propiedad garantizados y autentificados que permiten adquirir obras de arte virtuales, se ha apoderado del mercado del arte. Los NFT [siglas en inglés de non fungible token o activo digital indivisible], que aparecieron hace pocos años en el mercado, ofrecen sin duda nuevas posibilidades de ingresos a los artistas e invitan a los museos a interesarse por el arte digital. Pero, ¿se trata de una auténtica revolución o de una burbuja especulativa?
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 Beeple’s 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 Babies—i.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 “definitive indicator of ownership” of digital artworks (Mackenzie and Bērziņa 2). Or, as Rachel O’Dwyer has summarised, NFT art auctions like the Ethereal Summit held in New York in 2018 allow individuals to bid for the “ownership and provenance details of the works of art encrypted in the Ethereum blockchain and represented by a token” (O’Dwyer). 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 commonplace—e.g., art gallery giftshops will often sell relatively low-cost posters of masterpieces like Picasso’s Guernica, or coffee table books showcasing the masterworks of influential movements like post-impressionism—there 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 artwork’s 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 “enrichment economy”. 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 “unforgettable” experiences have become more economically significant. For Boltanski and Esquerre, enrichment refers both to the often-discursive refining and redefining of existing commodities—such that they fetch greater prices—and a greater emphasis on an economy for those with disposable income—such 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 “underlying substratum that is purely and simply the past” (2). For this reason, the enrichment economy requires the production of new forms of authenticity, “aura”, 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 “enriched” 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 “disrupting the art market” (Tripathi)—supposedly evinced by the staggering growth of the NFT market, and emerging institutional recognition, such as ArtReview’s decision to place an NFT at the top of their Power 100 List for 2021—this article seeks to locate the NFT explosion within a slightly longer timeframe, one in which NFTs would feature as a continuation—albeit a non-linear one—rather 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 Castor’s claim that “it’s hard to justify that a Bored Ape NFT is worth $300,000 based on the art” (quoted in Artnet), almost identical criticisms have been raised around the contemporary artist Maurizio Cattelan’s 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 “what makes something a high-priced artwork when another, seemingly identical, object is not?” (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 works—often requiring relatively small amounts of time and inexpensive materials—raised suspicions that art was becoming indistinguishable from more traditional financial assets. In response, in 1968 the influential art critic Leo Steinberg argued that, “avant-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 vaults” (quoted in Beech 300). As Dave Beech has shown, in the ensuing period, “art’s relationship to finance capital has outstripped Steinberg’s worst fears” (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 299–300). When interest rates are low, investments in productive capital offer low levels of liquidity, and international markets appear vulnerable to shocks, artworks—whether physical or in the form of an NFT—offer 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 “the bottom from falling out of a market they have already invested in” (O’Dwyer). 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 art’s economic value—insofar as ready-made artworks could now fetch prices typically reserved for laboriously produced and unique masterpieces. Take, for example, Yves Klein’s 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 “immaterial zone” for varying quantities of gold, with “20 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 expensive” (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 “the full authentic immaterial value of the work” (Klein quoted in Cras 24). We see some resemblances here between Klein’s Zones and NFTs—and 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 “the 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 practice” (Cras 3). If artists were increasingly embracing the artwork’s status as an asset, and if the price of artworks became divorced