Noah Davis, Director of Sales at Fountain.
CryptoPunk #9020. Courtesy Noah Davis.
The Baer Faxt: What common misconceptions should new collectors to digital art avoid?
Noah Davis: I know what you’re thinking… The world of NFTs is just a casino where terminally online young men trade ugly cartoon monkeys back and forth. Every once in a while, they realize obscene profits (and losses, too). It’s an amusing idea, for sure, and makes a great headline! But the truth is that this nascent space is still a frontier, where pioneering artists—including the late Frank Stella, Tom Sachs, Jenny Holzer, Damien Hirst, Urs Fischer, Takashi Murakami, et al.—are making experiments that can challenge conventional notions of what art is. They’re also establishing new, equitable markets to offer work directly to collectors. Platforms such as Art Blocks, Verse, Fellowship, DAILY and Foundation are consistently curating art for a space that’s accessible to anyone, anywhere in the world, at any hour of the day. Reports of the “Death of NFTs” aren’t completely, utterly wrong, but they are exaggerated. The early success of Fountain, a brokerage I co-founded in late 2023, is a testament to the enduring strength of the blue-chip NFT sector, at least. We’ve already realized two sales north of $10,000,000. This was the first one.
One of my guilty pleasures is scrolling through the comments sections on traditional media coverage of expensive NFT sales. Without fail, someone will gleefully boast that they’ve just “right-click-saved” the subject artwork, declaring that with a few deft clicks of their keyboard, they are now just as much the rightful owner as the fool who made the newsworthy purchase. I love this refrain because it’s basically a perfect illustration of how magical and important NFT technology is: Yep, anyone can copy a JPEG, PNG or GIF because purely digital media is fungible by default. Consider how contemporary photography (as a popular collecting category) has mostly nosedived since the advent of the digital image. I’d bet this is because any digital image is infinitely and easily reproducible. The digital image is in constant danger of being “right-click-saved.” Why invest in something with such a fatal vulnerability?
NFTs, however, are practically impossible to copy or even destroy. If you want to obliterate a Non-Fungible Token, the best you can do is send it to a dead-end burn address, where it becomes forever irretrievable (but still exists as an indelible entry on the blockchain). If you want to copy or forge one, you’re shit outta luck. It’s impossible… In the master forger Ken Perenyi‘s Caveat Emptor, he details duping the major New York City auctioneers into flogging his fakes to seasoned collectors, again and again. Perenyi got away with his scam because methods for testing the authenticity of his forgeries relied greatly on the opinions of individual experts. And, clearly, you can trick an expert. But you can’t trick a blockchain.
Unlike the highest echelons of the traditional art market, the new digital art space is completely transparent. Ownership is cryptographically verified, self-custodied wallet balances are visible to anyone and everyone with a basic ability to parse Etherscan, and every single transaction is recorded in real time on a distributed ledger that cannot be altered or tampered with by bad actors. On-chain analytics make it possible for collectors to visualize any artist’s market comprehensively, and in granular detail. In truth, the new digital art market is an equal playing field for both artists and collectors. The old adage “trust but verify” is outdated here. Just skip straight to verify. The blockchain cannot tell a lie.
