With most NFT implementations, everything you're getting is 100% public and can be bit-for-bit seen, downloaded, and redistributed by anyone. (There's always the possibility of off-chain solutions that grant access to exclusive content only if you prove you own the token, and they're built into some platforms. But these seem to mostly be novelties at this point, and with current solutions there's always the risk of the provider getting hacked and all the exclusive content leaking, etc.)
This is why it's hard to equate piracy with theft and NFT ownership with physical painting ownership, I think. You can probably equate the speculative parts of art collection to it, where the collector (or "investor") may never actually care about the work intrinsically and may never be closer than 1000 miles away from it because they view it solely as a financial asset. No idea what % of the current physical art collection market is like that, though.
You definitely have control over the physical object. You don't, however, have control over whether or not the artist can sell prints. The artist retains the copyright and will be able to sell prints, including signed or limited edition prints, without your permission. This might not apply if you commissioned the work (e.g. it's a portrait of yourself or your family), but then the same principle would apply to a purely digital artwork.
In general, thinking about NFTs in terms of ownership of the original work, or of the copyright, is a mistake, and one that the article also makes. For some reason people seem to expect that buying an NFT ought to confer ownership of the copyright, or that it's somehow remarkable that it does not (the OP says "Sundaresan doesn’t own the copyright to Everydays. All he bought was a non-fungible token (NFT)"). But physical art doesn't work that way, and I'm not sure why we would assume any differently for digital art. NFTs are best understood as providing a mechanism for creating the equivalent of autographed prints, which is valuable for digital artists because nobody wants to buy their original AfterEffects or Processing or Blender files.
Even this, I assume, is based on the assumption that someone, someday will want to do what you describe (hang it on a wall and have exclusive access) and pay you for the privilege to do so. Right now, that isn't really possible with an NFT.
How do you link the provenance of a piece of art to an NFT? i.e what's the difference between an artist agreeing to the NFT being minted and a grifter creating an NFT on a marketplace that's trying to link it to the artist's work?
I imagine solutions to mitigate this will become more common on the big platforms at some point. (I briefly considered maybe trying to work on one.) An NFT listing could contain some kind of publicly verifiable authenticity certificate issued by a separate (semi-?)decentralized service that just does things like authenticity verification.
For example, they could perhaps have a procedure where an NFT minter (such as an artist) has to, among other things, sign and post some message across at least 5 social media accounts confirming they created a token with that contract address and token ID. If after ~10 days the claimed individual re-affirms the signed messages and no issues are found (e.g. account compromise), the certificate could be validated and the NFT could be marked as verifiably attributable.
Theoretically, an NFT smart contract could also maybe even try to bake part of it into the logic and NFT metadata, rather than it being just at the platform level.
We're really still in the early Wild West days of smart contracts, dapps, tokens, etc. It probably will feel a bit less sketchy in a few years. Maybe.
early stage Physical BTC collector here to say yep, chain of custody is super important for collectibles in general. Provenance is king.
I am not an art collector, but as I understand it, the most important thing that they care about, even before aesthetics of an art piece, is *provenance*. That is, who created it, and who has owned it since it was created. NFTs provide a nearly unforgeable cryptographic record of both of those things, and are therefore a perfect fit for this market.