NFT Philosophy

How can something that has no real aesthetic, even artistic, value be worth millions of times more than another? You could say this is a function of an effective marketing campaign. Social media makes this easy, but difficult in most cases.

If social media didn't yet exist, and we still placed ads in print publications, some classified sections would be too huge to print. Even if it was digitized, the probability that someone would see a 2x1 inch (or 6pt font) ad is so low. Consequently, people buy bigger ads, but it has no real bearing on intrinsic value. What it adds in scarcity and fear (FOMO).

Recently, I was listening to the Sam Harris interview with philosopher Jay Garfield, and on this point, he used the analogy of money and how value is imputed by a "package" of cultural values which differentiates fungible iterations:

From the video transcript:

"...I've got is a piece of paper in green ink there's nothing about the paper and the green ink that make it worth five dollars it's worth five dollars because we've got the institution of the federal reserve because I can exchange it for five ones because I can buy something with it people will accept it for as a five dollar note unlike say an IOU or some confederate money and it's important to see that the identity of that piece of paper as a five dollar note depends upon this vast network not only of physical causes and conditions but of conceptual activity that constitutes its value as a five dollar note i mean after all if I've got a five dollar note and a twenty dollar note the paper and the ink are worth exactly the same in both of those cases it's not like there's four times as much really cool paper and ink in the 20 note as there is in the five but we have different conceptual responses to them and those conceptual responses don't reflect the identity of the two notes as a five and a ten rather they constitute that identity and the more we look the more we see that almost everything that we take seriously as a real existent is interdependent in all of these three senses it's causally interdependent..." 

This is a possible philosophical explanation of how an NFT can have value beyond what appears on the surface. To some extent, almost all contemporary conceptual art is about what doesn't appear on the surface, and is up to the viewer to interpret. The problem in my view is that in the absence of an explanation provided by the artist, there is no stable "valuation", so in the NFT world the "white painting" or "black painting" can be done in any form by anyone and perhaps have more value than a Robert Ryman or an Ad Reinhardt if those artist names aren't present. If more artists started doing them as a kind of parody, something would have to affect their fungibility, so the NFT is a way to do that, but in my view is less conceptually interesting, but might gather some remuneration, perhaps more than what a Ryman would go for. The obvious distinction is texture, something that is absent from digital art, but perhaps might not be a selling point from a purely economic standpoint.