Nearly a year ago, one of my friends had begun creating beautiful digital works of art. He was a professional artist who was so excited about how the market will just snap up all of his creative images. I took a look at his collection I noticed that this guy had some serious talent. It wasn't some kind of collection of random stick figure drawings. He created various abstract patterned "quilt" style art as well as digital paintings of breathtaking landscapes.
He decided to sell his NFTs on one of the most popular NFT marketplace platforms at that time - OpenSea. It was convenient because he was used to using crypto and working with dApps on the Ethereum and Polygon networks. He commented that one of the best features of OpenSea was its easy-to-use interface. You could probably enter into OpenSea and adapt to its functionality in just a few hours.
He prepared his files for the minting and signed up for an OpenSea account. Not too long afterward, he was uploading NFTs to that platform like a pro. He was placing great item descriptions, including the proper tags, and placing a reasonable price tag for the quality of his NFT works. After minting about seven or eight NFTs and placing them for sale, he decided that he would wait for the people to just come in to buy and "take 'em into their NFT bags". He had spent many days working on each NFT. His hard work should have paid off, right? Well, let's see.
One week passed. No buy offers. Then two weeks passed. He got one 'like' on one of his artworks, but no buy offers. Then three months passed. He got one more 'like' on one of his NFTs, but still no buy offers. Initially, he thought that maybe the market needed to see more of his NFTs to be convinced about his artistic prowess. So, he made more NFTs. In fact, he made about 100 more of them (with the help of some of his artistic friends). After waiting for about two more months, he received a couple more likes on his NFTs which was a small morale booster. However, there were still no buy offers.
By now, my friend had literally spent hundreds of hours creating these specially crafted NFTs without any buy offers. Then, he began to wonder, "what do the buyers like"? After doing some research, he was shocked to find that an NFT that showed a pixelated image of a random thing sold for millions of dollars. He also noted that a number of kids' and teens' just got their NFTs bought on a whim for millions. After doing a bit more research, he said that "the consistently popular 'artists' had been racking up sales and royalty revenue from these pieces of [...] art. I mean, is a blurry pixelated picture of a rock even art? Am I missing something here?"
My friend was absolutely devastated. In a shaky voice, he said, "Do you know how much time I spent on these things? How in the world are my NFT artworks going to be recognized if buyers are just going for random pieces of [nothing]. This is not art! This is madness! That's like selling a tree branch on the side of the road and making a million bucks!". For a moment, I thought he was going to go berserk, but luckily he didn't.
Ok, so let's step back for a second and analyze the situation. You might argue that art can take many different forms and that beauty is in the eye of the beholder. If you think about it, he was right in a sense. During the holiday season, what kinds of greeting cards do you send to your loved ones? Surely, the ones with a painting of a beautiful landscape with snow-covered houses, reindeer, and lush green pine trees on the cover would be an attractive option. Or would you rather choose a card with a very blurry and pixelated image of cat feces (which is 'technically' also art)?
What do you think of the current NFT art craze? If you had to give this artist some constructive (and profitable) advice, what would it be? Your comments are much welcomed in the comment section below.