Over the past couple of weeks I've been speaking with artists and picks-and-shovel folk in the NFT space. People sit on varying levels of belief, but there is zero doubt that there is a lot happening and it's happening fast.
"It's still early" is almost a cliché at this point. Everyone agrees that there is something happening and it could be huge or it maybe not, but either way it's early. You can look back and feel shit about missing out on buying eth at $200 or picking up CryptoPunk for cheap, but if you look forward two, five, ten years down the track, what will this space look like then?
It's impossible for me to not look at what is happening through a web2.0 lens. How would Positive Posters have been different if this technology had existed in 2009? How would you design and build an online community for artists if we had been able to help them monetise like you can in 2021?
I suppose those are technical questions and ideas. A less technical thought is less about how PP could've worked and more why it existed. What attracted artists and designers to the platform in the first place?
One insight that existed back then was that designers were swamped with uni/college projects and client briefs, but they wanted a way to feel like they were having impact with their work. We rocked up and invited people to do that. It was essentially a giant online group show with a common theme/brief.
When you spin around the different NFT platforms today, you see artists creating individual pieces of work and sometimes collections of similar pieces as part of a body of work. That seems to be a cowpath that is going to be paved soon enough.
I wonder if the another thing to appear will be maybe not something like PP (with the competition mechanic), but group collections or shows that are around a brief/theme.
What would it look like if we had a climate change (maybe bad example ;) collection? With minting work that responds to that idea? At a given point in time? How would that work and who would organise it?
What would exhibitions of that work look like? That's an exciting question. These are all exciting questions.
I believe in arts role in moving culture forward and helping drive and direct people's awareness. So I can't see how that won't happen here somehow.
It's still early and these are early ideas, but it all feels exciting to me.
