Nina Dyer – Optimism has its precedents: situating the rise of NFTs

Nina Dyer, Depot Artspace’s exhibition curator and gallery manager recently published an in-depth article on demystifying NFT’s on the Aotearoa Digital Arts Network library. Below is an excerpt, and a link to the full article.

The internet today is not the optimistic, exchange-based culture that net.art emerged from during the early 1990s. Capital has crept into even the most inane corners of the internet since the dot com boom and bust, consuming social interactions and expelling them as marketing data. Creative works from explicit selfies to independent podcasts have increasingly shifted behind subscription-based paywalls (OnlyFans, Patreon), producing new attitudes towards the value of digital ephemera. In the last few years, cryptocurrency technology has given rise to NFTs or Non-Fungible Tokens, a new online infrastructure for the transfer of ownership title.