From The Telegraph, October 4:
The mad gold rush of the digital art world has come to an abrupt end – and people are losing money fast
“Everyone during this time, everyone I knew, was saying, ‘You gotta make an NFT,’” says the painter Max Denison-Pender, recalling the tulip fever that spread through the art world at the beginning of the 2020s. Its peak was marked by one seismic event. In March 2021, the venerable auction house Christie’s sold its first wholly digital artwork, Everydays: the First 5000 Days, by the artist known as Beeple, for $69.3 million (about £50m) in cryptocurrency, making it one of the most expensive works ever sold by a living artist; by contrast, Jeff Koons’s stainless steel sculpture Rabbit (1986) sold for $91.07 million in 2019 at the same auction house.
Everydays was a vast collage of individual digital works that its creator had been posting online at the rate of one a day since May 1, 2007. But there was little reason to believe that the art world had found another Warhol or Picasso. The Telegraph’s chief art critic dismissed the work as “a symptom of the desolation of digital culture”. Whatever you thought of it as an artwork, though, its price tag drove the art market into a frenzy. By December 2021, the digital artist Pak had sold a single artwork, Merge, split into 312,686 NFTs, for $91.8m at Art Basel. And it wasn’t even any good. It was an uninteresting monochrome digital image of spheres that suggested planetary (or molecular) distance.
But that was then, and this is now. In September this year, Christie’s quietly shuttered its specialist digital art division. Sotheby’s hasn’t entirely walked away from crypto art sales, but was left red-faced in 2022, when an NFT seller withdrew all lots as buyers waited with paddles in hand, then posted two hours later that he was “taking punks mainstream by rugging Sotheby’s” – a term for when crypto developers attract investors to a product, then disappear. The NFT boom has long since turned to bust, doing much damage to the reputation of digital art in the process, and one can only look back in amazement and ask, what the hell happened?
....MUCH MORE
But CryptoKitties, they're still bid, right?
If interested see also:
March 2021 - Big Law (Latham & Watkins) On Whether Or Not NFT's Are Securities
April 2021 - Parents, Have You Talked To Your Kids About The End Of The NFT Boom?
Although not as crucial to their understanding of the world as the yield curve "talk", this is something the wee munchkins should be prepared for....December 2021 - NFT Fat-Finger: Offering The NFT At $3000 When You Meant $300,000
January 2022 - NFT's And The Metaverse: "When the Stagnation Goes Virtual"
"But there is no natural scarcity in the digital world.
All the scarcity in this metaverse economy has to be imposed,
against the nature of the medium, at great effort and energy cost.
In the physical world, competition exists by necessity.
In the metaverse, it exists for its own sake—or maybe for the sake of investors."
May 2022 - Fringe Finance: "People Are Taking Out Loans Against Their NFTs—And Defaulting"
July 2022 - Can you truly own anything in the metaverse? (or in Canada?)
...The mention of Canada in the headline refers not just to the freezing of citizen's bank accounts by the the State during the trucker protests but encompasses how casually, even flippantly Trudeau and Freeland went about their totalitarian business. OED via Lexico:
Totalitarian: Relating to a system of government that is centralizedand dictatorial and requires complete subservience to the state.Can there be anything more frightening than someone with a Chilliwack accent saying:
"If we see you oot and aboot in your truck, it's our money then, eh?"well, maybe a few things
Still though, it was a bit of an eye-opener to see how quickly the government used the Emergencies Act, which is supposed to be used for, well, emergencies, how quickly they considered it just another Enabling Act. Speaking of which—and the Reichstag Fire Decree—I see that ##BlackfaceHitler is trending again in the Great White North, this time regarding the government's decision to emulate the Dutch nitrogen rules.
Anyway, where was I?Metaverse, owning stuff in the metaverse.
Seotember 2022 - "Islamic State Turns to NFTs to Spread Terror Message"
And finally (there are many more but we're getting into "stop me before I link again territory") finally:
June 2018 - CryptoKitty Trading Volume Collapses: Andreessen, Union Square and Climateer Hurt Worst
