Social impacts of NFT

The reading discusses NFT (Non-fungible tokens) and how it impacts digital artists and collectors. NFT adds authenticity to digital artwork like images, music, or videos, and it helps protect the artwork’s ownership to prevent people from stealing the artwork online through screenshots. The author embraces this new trend in the digital art market because it “economically legitimizes an emerging artform.”

The reading mentions an artist called Andre Benson, who had been experimenting with digital video works for years but had not received any financial rewards. He had to work in a software company to support his career as an artist. However, after selling his work through NFT, he could sustain himself solely through art, which liberated him from doing tedious but necessary jobs.

Despite its benefit to artists and collectors, NFT has its setbacks. Like bitcoins, NFT relies on blockchain technology to add uniqueness to each artwork, which relies on a tremendous amount of computing power that is not environmentally friendly. Moreover, it does not legally prevent people from stealing artwork; it merely protects the metadata of the artwork rather than the work itself. Therefore, NFT is not the prime solution to add ownership to artwork.