Thread by @AlexandraErin

I've seen a lot of people apparently defending NFTs by saying, of NFT-associated artwork, "People who keep asking what utility it has don't ask that of other art."

There may be other viewpoints, but for my part, it's the utility of the *token* that I question, personally.

The utility of art is that it's art. I know that art speculation (and art-based money laundering) predate NFTs by a wide margin, but by and large, one spends money on art in order to have more of it. The art is an end in itself.

If you tell me you're making art, I don't have to ask you what it does. You might have deeper goals. It might accomplish other things. But its main job is to be art.

If you tie this art to something else that's complicated and effort/resource-intensive, that's a different story.

If you visit it in person, the Mona Lisa can only be viewed through a pane of bulletproof glass.

This glass changes the appearance of the artwork, complicating the experience of viewing it in a way that was not contrived for artistic effect.

The glass is not intended as art.

In fact, while the transparency of the material has been improved over the years, the original glass was considered to noticeably degrade the experience of viewing the painting, compared to viewing it unobstructed.

But the purpose of the glass was judged worth the trade off.

What was the purpose of the glass? Why do you put anything behind a bulletproof barrier? For protection, from vandalism via projectiles, caustic chemicals, of any other means a visitor might reasonably smuggle into an art museum.

They put one of the most recognizable paintings in the world -- one that people travel thousands of miles to see once in their lives -- behind a blurry pane of glass because the alternative was risking an outcome where no one could see it at all anymore.

If the glass did not have such an obvious utility, it would be natural to ask of the person who decided it should be layered onto the artwork, "What does the glass add to this? What can we do with the glass that we can't do without it, and why would we want to do that?"

And when artwork NFTs started getting big hype, the idea was sold to people with all kinds of supposed utility: it prevents fraud or theft (LOL), it means you can pay artists (you could/should have been doing that already), it gives you more control over your asset (nope).

And as those lofty claims of how NFTs were *useful* to artists fell apart under scrutiny and real-world field tests, it feels like the goalposts are moving to "Useful? Who said art has to be useful?"

So, again, to be clear: the NFT layer isn't the art. And it *should* be useful.