I know. It's a nightmare. Several people I used to admire in the space have succumbed to the NFT virus. All they do now is shill for their latest 'drops'.

The demo scene this is not anymore. It used to be about fun, experimentation and showing off mad coding (and lately ml) skills. Now it's a pyramid scheme. I'm unsubscribing.

Or maybe I'm just getting old

Note that a number of the artists providing the prompts here are doing NFTs (and great ones too).

I've got no objection to artists doing NFTs. I just want places I can engage with their work and not have a constant reminder that it's a commercial transaction. It's just off putting when every single tweet about generative art is accompanyed by a loud sales pitch. It's like turning a gallery into a street market.

I generally am not fond of NFTs myself, but want to give a counter point - while it's no fun to see artists you like posting a lot about NFTs, it's also great they can now get paid to do art. For established artists this means high purchase prices that (in the thousands, not something crazy) that make being a full time artist viable and acts as pay off for doing it for many years without much of a financial incentive. For smaller artists, it makes focusing on art as a source of income more viable. Personally i've bought some NFTs on hitenunc and was glad to support artists whose work I liked. Sure, buying some prints or something would be nicer, but that's not easy to set up, and the margins on that are presumably low.

I somehow doubt that NFTs provide a sustainable way of increasing the amount of money spent on art. If an artist couldn't make it by selling prints or collecting donations in the past, why would people now suddenly spent more money on that artist's art just because instead of a print you get an NFT?

I think more people will buy into an unknown artist’s NFT collection as a speculative investment than will buy their prints for the same reason. There is an established secondary market for NFTs in a way that there isn’t really for prints by unknown artists. Digital goods are always easier to buy than physical ones. Also NFTs do have an advantage for the artist that they can guarantee themselves a portion of future resale value.

I’m not entirely convinced it’s sustainable either, but I can absolutely see why right now some artists are able to make massively more from NFTs than they could from prints.

I'm sorry, but you're wrong. The thing is, when folks typically buy art it's either because they connect with the artist, the piece, or the time and place. This doesn't happen very often, even for great artists. With NFTs, there are collectors that are looking at this stuff through a different lens. They are incentivized to collect for various reasons, usually because of the tie-in with investing, etc.

I'm a great example - I've been doing art for almost 20 years and have made a few hundred bucks here and there selling prints, paintings, having art shows, etc.

In 2021, I made about 2x what I make from my tech job selling NFTs. I consider myself lucky, but at the same time, there are thousands like me.

I too occasionally like money.

Is it possible to see NFTs without the levels of self-promotion I see on Twitter? I really couldn't bring myself to do that.

Yeah, I hear you, but I suppose it comes with the territory. You can try to curate your social media experience by not following/muting folks, but if you're into art I think you will have a hard time avoiding NFTs. I've noticed some art communities are completely defiant, cartoonists in particular.

> Is it possible to see NFTs without the levels of self-promotion I see on Twitter? I really couldn't bring myself to do that.

They're tied together. You need to start thinking of yourself as an NFT influencer, rather than an artist.

Sadly then it's not for me.

It may not be sustainable long term, but as it's currently a fad it's a nice way to kick start some income. NFTs also have the benefit of being browsable on sites like hitenunc, so instead of finding the artist on Instagram or Twitter you can come across them on such a site. Lastly, personally for small artists I think of it as a way to send a little money their way, like a PayPal donation or Patreon (i'm a big user of the latter) but by expressing my appreciation for particular peices of art. If they appreciate in value, that's cool too.

PS I'm not exactly rich as a grad student, so I've just spent about $100 so far. No idea if any of what I bought can be re sold, maybe I'll look sometime.

Cryptokitties explored this, and I suppose the answer is that eventually the market evaporates.

It's really amazing that if you search for generative music on Twitter you find mostly NFT projects/people:

https://twitter.com/search?q=generative+music&src=typed_quer...

(But if you search for stochastic music you find almost nothing).

I for one think it’s a very interesting time for generative art sparked by NFTs. People that I’m following since Macromedia Flash for their digital experiments are suddenly creating NFTs. In the process everybody is motivated to improve their quality.

Yes, there are some annoying effects as well, the shilling and hyper speculation. But overall I’ve seen an amazing output of interesting works last year. Some of the recent works of Genuary that I’m seeing are really interesting.

> How refreshing to see a mention of generative art that isn't followed by the mention of "NFTs".

Well, thanks for kicking things off for us!

The irony is that this is the top comment, so it is in fact a mention of generative art followed by the mention of NFTs.