Is NFT art any good?

Brad Troemel described the current state of NFT art as "visual dogshit" in a recent slideshow. Troemel said that nobody cares what these images look like if they can be produced quickly in large quantities and avoided risky artistic gestures.

According to Troemel, the defining production method across all NFTs is that they are auto-generated as a bunch of hundreds or thousands of images to be sold at a time.

It is easy to see that he means what he says. A monkey with a gold chain necklace is one of the cartoons in the biggest NFT series. Intellectual property surrounds these characters. They can be exploited for their recognizability without having to change anything.

It's a common problem in the art world. NFTs are the biggest thing to happen to art markets in a long time, but most of them are insipid and uninteresting. When investors spend a lot of money on a token, they tend to buy a lot of bragging rights.

It doesn't always work like that. Anything can be an NFT if it is tagged to a token on the blockchain. There are a lot of digital art that has been written off because of the general NFT exhaustion.

Tina Rivers Ryan, one of the foremost historians of digital art, told me it was important to distinguish different tendencies. She believes that there are projects that use the blockchain but also explore its limits to make us rethink concepts such as value, ownership, and authenticity. She uses the term "crypto art" to describe art that celebrates cryptocurrencies, such as illustrations of Musk with red laser eyes.

Most of the rest is not art from the internet, but rather art from other sources. She calls it digital art, or digital design, which has been tokenized to allow it to be bought and sold.

Bored Ape Yacht Club is a profile picture project that is mostly in the digital design category. The same window-like abstractions were painted over the course of twenty years. The name of Warhol's headquarters was the Factory because he manufactured his silk screen celebrity paintings at an industrial scale. The work of Warhol andRothko is contemplative. The color field format was used byRothko to induce a state of self-examination, since the paintings resist interpretation in a way that distracts viewers. Warhol applied logic to fine art in a way that made people rethink their opinion on what makes an object valuable.

What makes CryptoPunk unique? It's clever meta-commentary isn't as effective as it could be, but it's one of the rare batches in a collection of 10,000 NIFTs. Like many other PFPs, theCryptoPunks play on nostalgia for low-bit graphics. To make sense of a work of art, you need to know what you like, what you don't like, and what stories it is trying to tell you. It can be done at a glance without asking how it makes you feel. It gives the illusion of knowing who you are and what matters to you.

Even though I have a list of bestsellers, there are still plenty of NFTs that bother me. An NFT trend I call the "mood piece" is a scene that's static but for a few animated elements. Think of the lofi girl with her headphones on, relaxing in front of her computer. On paper, the scene depicted in Replicator couldn't be more nondescript: a copy machine in a high-rise office after hours blinks to life and then turns off again. The neo-noir shadows and the glowstick colors cast by the office equipment create an atmosphere that is interesting for how inscrutable it is. The copy machine, which is beeping its way towards obsolescence, is working late and unloved, and it looks out the window to contemplate the many other lives it could have lived. There is a piece about death.

The concept of the work is that the NFT self-generates unique variations of itself, mimicking the copy machine. It is an interesting use of the technological function, even though I am not completely convinced that it works.

A time-honored tradition in conceptual art is to take things most people wouldn't consider art and call it art. This could be called a troll. In this case, the piece is a single gray piece, and it's up for sale. Black Square by Kazimir Malevich in 1913 was the beginning of the great monopolization of art history, which continued through the post-war period when Yves Klein painted with his trademark blue. Black Square is a great example of how art is still a good way to cause a scandal. It is extremely difficult to display, since the smallest part of the screen is barely visible. If you blow it up to a bigger size, it is no longer a small object.

Tina Rivers Ryan thinks that there are more provable examples of what she sees asBlockchain art. Berlin-based contemporary artist Simon Denny, who represented his native New Zealand at the Venice Biennale in 2015, was one of the first artists to ponder on the technology's social ramifications. His project Backdated NFT/Cryptokitty Display Hardware wallet replica is a challenge to the idea of tokenization as a one-of-a-kind and un changeable. The token points to a URL where the file is stored on the open web because the digital image or video in question is too big to be stored on the block chain. Denny told the magazine that the digital assets can be changed. You can put a different image in the URL of the original image. I did the same thing. By purchasing older token and making them point to different media, he revealed the limits of the permanence that is supposed to distinguishBlockchain from other forms of archive.

Each of the three examples invites viewers to ponder a mystery in their own way. The sterile white-collar scene seems sad. Should a piece of artwork that you can't see be considered art? Will our data last forever? If only a sunrise or a field of flowers could make you reconsider what you thought you knew about art, it would be worth it. The long-standing movement of artists who use technology to make people think will still be here when the Beanie Baby is gone.