Wikipedia Doesn’t Consider NFTs Art, and Crypto Investors Are Worried
Wikipedia’s editors should codify their decision to separate the lists of NFTs from the list of artworks
Sometimes debates about art have nothing to do with the pieces of work at all. When considering whether something may be art, it often comes down to a subjective reason. What you consider art may not be worth putting in a museum, dissected for decades in art history courses, or listed in encyclopedias for future generations. Currently, Wikipedia is debating how artworks are categorized, and in December, Wikipedia editors have made a preliminary decision to separate NFTs sales from the list of sales of artworks, reigniting the timeless debate of how we define art.
As you can imagine, this caused a chaotic reaction among NFT investors who may have believed they’d invested in a new medium of art. NFTs, or non-fungible tokens, are strings of code on the blockchain ledger. Because visual data cannot be actually added to blockchain, the token can be the link to the artwork that is stored on another server. The token is technically the provenance of the artwork or a certificate of ownership rather than the actual work of art.
When I knew very little about NFTs, I thought the NFT was the artwork, not the link to…
