Oh, that bit.
The NFT links back to the original artwork, hosted on a server somewhere as all digital files must, to verify that somebody bought the rights to it, or in this case a (or rather the) licence. You can resell that licence of course but never the artwork itself.
It’s not a physical item that hangs in your home or on loan to a gallery. Sat on a webpage the artwork has no inherent value because it adds nothing to the physical realm like a painting or a print. People buy art to display it. What good is art if it doesn’t brighten the world or provoke discourse in a public realm?
Markets have long struggled with the idea of data being equivalent to something physical. The idea with the NFT ‘licence’ was to try to add real world scarcity economics to digital objects. In practice this does not work. As we have seen through music, movie and video game piracy creating a million exact duplicates of a stack of data is incredibly easy. It’s why these companies involved chase down pirates at every turn, as they are obliged to. When you ‘buy’ a digital game you are only buying a licence to use it and an actual product. If paying for something isn’t ownership then is copying it even stealing?
The point is that if I want that digital artwork to exist in the physical realm I have two options: buy a high resolution print from the original artist and reimburse them for their time or if this option is not available clone it and print it off myself which could be classed as ‘stealing’ if Google didn’t exist to find it in the first place and the ‘save as’ option was blocked from the OS.
This is why the NFT market was a ‘scam’. The data it pointed to is largely worthless because it’s so easy to clone. If somebody wants a reprint for their lounge to add value to their home they will do what I did and buy or make a physical copy. And the NFT only has value if there is somebody who will buy it from you for more than you paid which at this point is unlikely. If the artist forgets to keep their website open, closes their server or is subject to linkrot then what do you have left? A certificate saying you own a 404 error?!
To really buy an original digital artwork you’d have to have the artist send it to you on a USB stick and sign some sort of waiver saying they deleted all originals from their own computer in the process. In this transaction the NFT does nothing because the artwork data exists outside of the web.
Incidentally I wrote a whole other article about the lunacy of software and data being encoded to a piece of plastic somehow giving the consumer more rights than that of a download: https://medium.com/@carlst-james/why-does-a-plastic-disk-give-us-more-consumer-rights-437928e62603
