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.

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More from @AlexandraErin

15 Dec
We've got two cats in our house. One of them understands doors well enough to let herself into a room, close the door behind her if she wants privacy, and then let herself out again. The other gets herself stuck in rooms by closing the door accidentally.
The one who has figured out doors also understands mirrors enough that she can plot sneak attacks based on watching reflections, while her sister routinely loses fights with her own reflection, shadow, and tail.
And no, we don't have the lever type doorknob. Mostly it's just that it's an old house with old doors and most of them will open if you jiggle the hardware a bit or give the wood a good thumb in the right spot near the latch.
Read 4 tweets
14 Dec
I loved reading this.

The more we watch the kind of "just in time" logistics that underpinned The Cold Equations breaking down all around us, the more deeply I come to despise that story.
Partway through Aimee Ogden's story, I thought I saw where she was going. I thought I saw a twist she was setting up that would poke a hole in the premises that John Campbell pushed on the original story to make certain the girl definitely died for holy physics and the economy.
But what she does instead is better than that. It's inspired. It rebukes not the specific fictional premises imposed on the original story as bounding conditions on its fictional universe, but the very existence of those premises. She rejects the premise behind the premises.
Read 7 tweets
14 Dec
PSA: I might block someone I interact with by accident, but if someone comes to you saying "Alexandra blocked me and I think it must be an accident because we never interact.", it probably wasn't.

If I don't like how someone treats others, I don't wait to see how they treat me.
I was contacted once because someone appeared to be going into a spiral over having been blocked by me, which they took as a public declaration that they were "dead to me" and possibly the start of some further hostilities.
At the risk of being "But for me that was Tuesday, and I don't think about you at all on Tuesday"... I had no idea who the person was or why, specifically, I had blocked them.

But at a guess, I probably saw them pitching similar drama at somebody I follow.
Read 10 tweets
14 Dec
More than this... I think we should not discount the extent to which human psychology means this feeling allows one to behave exactly as if one believed the false claims were true, because "they ought to be".
People... all people... "actually believe" something regarding factual matters in the same sense that we "actually remember" stuff that happened. Our brains are constructing things on the fly. If they feel consistent to us, we accept that the construct was always already there.
Yep.

"Where there's smoke, there must be fire... and where there's flames on the side of my face, there must be smoke, so here are a hundred things that *could be* smoke, and surely some of them must be."

Read 4 tweets
14 Dec
Bed - Head and Pen - 10 are the only two that I have any confidence about. This is the worst kind of guessing game pretending to be something else.
Like this is somebody synthesizing the ideas "preschoolers are too young to be tested on reading" and "preschoolers are old enough to understand rhymes" in the worst possible way.
...I thought the kid had spilled an ice cream cone on his head somehow, but I guess that's supposed to be a hose, maybe, and the stuff on his head is water, rendered differently from the sweat droplets that are there to provide backstory for the hosing.

Read 5 tweets
13 Dec
In which I outline my plans for a more sustainable and productive second week of the #NiNoBilMa experiment in progress.
The Twitter prompt games I tried last week were fun and interesting, but took more of my time and energy than I'd expected... and while I think the creativity that resulted within myself from them "counts", it kept me from doing more writing-writing.
Read 13 tweets

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