Wes Hazard is a Brooklyn based comic & storyteller.
“For me, the best thing about getting into NFTs a year ago has been the opportunity to see and learn about more art than I ever have in my life. Yes, art is just one sector of NFTs and, as I’ve written previously, I don’t find very much value in the term “NFT Art”, but one of the most prominent categories of art that you do see within the NFT world is long-form generative art.”
And that’s really it. More than one year ago, when NFT industry was just emerging, the main accent when answering a question “why are NFTs so useful?” was that NFT technology gives artists an opportunity to develop and become more popular on the internet and do not worry about copyright. But it also gave an opportunity to create an art in another new form. That is generative art, when people use not fluffy or digital brush (they actually don’t use brush at all) because they use code. They create art by programming.
“So the tools of the creators that make this kind of amazing work are code, and scripting libraries, and flow fields, and Perlin noise generators and well… But I ultimately don’t think it’s that much of a problem. My take is this: While generative art has been around for centuries or longer the advent of NFTs now allows digital generative artists, who have been plugging away diligently for decades to sell and market their work on a scale not seen before. The new sales/ownership/discovery mechanisms made possible by NFTs combined with this particular form of art expressing something essential about our current hyper-digital, hyper-networked, code-centric existence makes me believe that we are on the verge of a massive mainstreaming of awareness of and appreciation for generative art.”
If we take a look at the NFT art industry overall, we will see that almost every project’s collection counts thousands of similar NFTs. There are almost no projects that consists of 80 NFTs for example (or 100, or 56, or 340, it doesn’t matter). There always will be 10,000 (or 8,888, or 6,666, it also doesn’t matter) NFTs in one collection. But we know that there aren’t so many artists in the teams, so they could create an amount of unique arts like this. That’s why NFT collection generators exist, that is the reason why artists just draw separate parts of the picture and then randomly combine them by using code. And then they get a huge amount of unique similar renders, that can be putted into blockchain afterwards. It is the main feature of the crypto art for now.
In conclusion, the most important idea of this article is that NFT is not only about copyright or financial opportunity for artists. We can even see that true artists do not take the biggest part of the industry. The biggest part of the industry is taken by generative art projects that make more accent on the community around the projects but less actually on the art. And generative art is not a result of a commercial approach, it is the result of appeared opportunities because of advances in crypto technologies. And that’s great because it will stimulate further development if industry overall.
