A place to talk about art on Farcaster. Artwork created by jacob.eth

The art NFTs were born from a desire to decentralize art and creativity, putting power back into the hands of artists and collectors.

Finally artists could showcase their work without:
- the need for traditional gatekeepers
- having to prove that their art is good enough
- the need to ask for permission to be allowed to be seen

It allowed
- true artistic freedom
- direct connection with their audience

But the nice narrative that was sold to us did not match the reality.

We still ended up with middlemen…

The centralized NFT marketplaces that brought back the very barriers we tried to break.

We have to apply for some of those - for their teams to decide if we were good enough to be accepted or not. 

They have the power to ban artist accounts or delist collections if they choose so…

And in some cases our NFT art is not even truly ours.

Does it even make sense?

Interesting take on NFTs. Would love to see how this is seen by the artists and collectors in this channel.

A teller / of stories, that is me. / Curious to learn new ways to see. / Proud dad of two. Now, what / about you? | Builds https://paragraph.xyz/@trpplffct

I think what it proves is that the middlemen do serve a purpose: as to your point, they handle the marketing. And they ‘select’ what they can market. Does the market have poor taste: yes! 😉.
Having said that: pre-NFT I collected two digital artworks (which I think were proto-NFTs, but that’s another discussion), but since 100+ 📈. So something is working and the majority of the artists are still there, where some interesting marketplaces (e.g. AsyncArt) are already long gone.

Very interesting, I agree with this. It’s still pretty hard for a small artist to make it. Visibility is very hard to come by especially if you’re a little late.