What Does It Mean to Buy a Gif Jack Rusher⁠↗

After the invention of photography, artists and collectors had to come to terms with the fact that an artist can produce an unlimited number of identical prints of any photograph. The art world’s practical answer to the question of authenticity, and thus collectibility, in the era of mechanical reproduction was signed editions. For example, a good quality print of an Ansel Adams landscape can be purchased for around $20, while a signed and numbered print of the same scene sells for as much as $720,000 at auction.

What makes the signed edition valuable is, quite simply, the artist’s signature. When a collector paid nearly three quarters of a million dollars for that signed original, all but $20 of the purchase price was the cost of owning Ansel Adam’s signature in that particular context.

Photographic prints can be reproduced in unlimited quantities, but artists’ signatures cannot. This led to a situation where the market for art split in two, one fork for collectors and one for those only interested in the work as an experience. I would argue that this is good for everyone. Artists gained a way to sell work that would otherwise be reduced to a commodity, collectors gained access to a new and culturally vital art form, and great works of art became available to everyone at very close to the marginal cost of reproduction.

An NFT is a mechanism by which an artist can publicly attach their cryptographic signature to a digital work of art. In other words, it is a technology that supports in the context of digital arts the same kinds of signed editions that have existed in fine art photography for most of a century.

NFTs do not create “artificial scarcity”, but are rather a response to the “artificial abundance” of the Internet. The work remains free to the world while only the artist’s signature remains scarce. And, just as with art prints, it is only the artist’s promise not to mint more copies of a certain work that protects a buyer’s investment.

This anti-digital snobbery is an example of the members of the old guard living in denial about the Internet’s role as the primary driver of global culture.

On the other hand, I can definitely think of more terrible uses for money given the worst possible outcome is to have financially supported an artist whose work you admire.