CULTURE SHOCK

NFTs

Have you heard about NFTs? People are spending millions on them.

I must cite Mitchell Clark’s Aug. 18, 2021, article on The Verge as a source of my own education. He broke it down nicely with a bitcoin vs. trading card analogy. Non-fungible tokens (NTFs) are something that is considered unique and cannot be replaced with something else. Bitcoin is fungible. If you trade bitcoin for bitcoin, you have the same thing. A one-of-a-kind trading card is non-fungible; if you trade it for a different card, you have a different card. Like many, I have heard about NFTs for months, but it took a really long car ride for me to dive deep. (I always learn new things in the car.)

Think of NFTs living in the same world as bitcoin. It is part of the Ethereum blockchain, like dogecoin and bitcoin. Digital art is not a new thing, but now anything digital can be called a NFT and have value. Remember the simple rudimentary drawings we drew in “Paint” in the ’90s on computers? Those are jpegs that are NFTs and have value. A tweet can now be NFT or a video, and they, too, have value.

You will ultimately need to Google NFT for a visual. Even writing this article has been a slow go because I keep clicking on art that has sold for silly money. They really do like original Nintendo characters. I found one article that had three images of a monkey, and the one that has a sailor’s hat on is apparently owned by Jimmy Fallon. The series is called Bored Ape Yacht Club, and it is a 10,000-image collection. People are purchasing

Culture Shock these profile pic collections and using them as profile pictures. So you can think of NFT as another form of branding. People are building communities around these themes, like Bored Yacht Club. Has your brain imploded yet? Keep clicking, the analogy here is a motorcycle one – HOG (Harley Owners Group). The concept of what is art is a rabbit hole we could travel down for years. You can splatter paint all you want, but there was only one Jackson Pollock. There was Lacey Howell that $120,000 banana from Art Basel in 2019 that was duct taped to a wall. I have always felt that when you buy art, you are investing in that person, the artist. I buy art from people I like. The art that grabs seven figures plus is really a reflection of how interesting, or how good of a salesperson, that artist is. The internet is saying, however, that NFT does give you ownership of the work. It cannot be copied. You can buy prints of Van Gogh in a bookshop, but there is only one original, and it is on the wall. It is 2022 and while our world has changed rapidly over the past two years, I find hope in the fact we all have the capacity to try to sell our tweets on Facebook marketplace. ~ Lacey Howell is a recovering English major from Auburn who now lives on Lake Martin, sells real estate, rides horses and loves good wine. Follow her on Instagram @LaceyHowell and on her Facebook page.