NFTs and the Future of Art

The importance of digital authorship.

Ellis Brooks
OneZero
Published in
15 min readDec 17, 2021

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Julie Blackmon, Homegrown Food (2012). Pigment print available at Edelman Gallery. Also minted as an NFT and listed at Quantum.

Multiple things can be true at once, even when they appear to be contradictory. Granite, for example, can be both solid and ethereal. Hold a chunk of it in the palm of your hand and it’s clearly a rock. View it at the atomic level and it’s a galaxy of particles. How you’d describe it depends entirely upon your frame of reference.

Similarly, NFTs can be trash-ass garbage peddled by blackpilled edgelords and grifters. NFTs can also reshape the trajectory of art in a way that is truly and deeply important.

I’m not interested in grifters or hype culture or anything within the vicinity of get-rich-quick rhetoric. I care about art. Specifically, I care about the fact that as the world shifts to an increasingly digital experience, artists have been left behind. And right now, NFTs look like the only way forward.

The Problem Posed by Digitization and Made Worse by Social Media

Before we can talk about art and NFTs, we need to talk about the digital revolution.

Remember video stores? Back in the nineties, if you wanted to see a movie at home, you had to go to a brick and mortar location, pick out a movie, take it to the checkout counter, and pay for the rental. It was a retail…

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Ellis Brooks
OneZero

Writer. Historian. Harlot. Supremely sex-positive and pseudonymous. she/her