“Peak Stupid!”

I’ve said in previous blog posts that I’m sure NFTs will be widely used in the art world over the next ten years. Not as art pieces themselves, but as digital ID tags that can be attached to each individual piece of art to prevent forgeries. I still think that is true.

But those weren’t the NFTs that made front page news in the art world. The NFTs everyone was talking about were digital art works that were being bought up for millions and tens of millions by digital billionaires.

I had little confidence in that use of NFTs. And what’s happened in recent months has persuaded me that I was right. The NFT-as-art craze has collapsed as quickly as the NFT market generally.

A little video made by a rich guy in Miami could have been a signal that the NFT-as-art boom had gone too far. The video shows him – at a party he threw to announce a collection of Frida Kahlo NFTs – destroying a drawing of hers that was supposedly worth $10 million.

I have a tough time believing that (1) anyone would destroy an original Frida Kahlo and (2) the drawing, if authentic, was worth anything close to what he claimed. In any case, when Number Three Son saw the story, he saw it as the top of the market, calling it “peak stupid.”

He was right. The NFT market crashed just a few weeks later.

Read about it here.