“NFTs need curation” is probably one of the most meaningless things that the influencers have been stating since the NFT boom kicked off in 2021. It’s meaningless because there have been many attempts to solve this problem, yet all of those attempts, including our own, JPG, have not managed to reach escape velocity, in part because of the lack of “big collector” support.
Ever since we paused JPG, I’ve had more time to follow the narratives that populated the NFT twitterverse - what a shit activity to pivot into. The goose at 6mm (good for Dmitri tho!), the different variations of boring Fidenza, the pfps and machi big brother, bad art, bad tech, bad new ventures, tasteless attempts to revitalize the NFT industry, and cringe “topcollectortopartist” conferences that (as far as reported on Twitter) yielded like 0 interesting or new conclusions. Everything is as bland as chewing cotton balls. There is no nuance, no smart contract poetry. And I realize that while NFTs have been cool, they are now down their most painful downward spiral, the one where the aforementioned nuance and innovation of the technology has been obliterated from the narrative.
NFT collectors gravitate towards trad art institutions to do the tastemaking, legitimacy-building and curation for them. Auction houses’ main thing is to make money, not to build context, or provenance, or any of the things I thought they did. They see money, they’re on the ball. They are smart, move fast, have big brands and centuries of history to support them. I applaud them, they’ve found a market, a court and every once in a while, they seem to make decent attempts at innovation.
The best products right now in the NFT industry then come from two auction houses, founded in 1766 and 1744, respectively. Congratulations web3, we’ve really outdone ourselves. There’s no use in combatting, we should actually applaud them because they won in the fairest of ways.
But back to “NFTs need curation”. How many curation products have we launched? Many. How many people have used them? Lol. I like to think that JPG did succeed, we created a whole new user behaviour and many faithful users that brought substance to the products. We made curation happen, our users succeeded in creating incredibly useful resources for everyone to access. Except very few people actually accessed them, in spite of the multiple e-mails, dms, blogposts, opinion panels, threads that have been published in search of those big names that could have maybe look to practice what they preached.
And now we need to put up with big collectors claiming they are working on building meaning. The meaning making machines were long set in motion before you decided to stop extracting for a while and see where to pivot to in light of a longer bear.
I look forward to the moment where those that contributed to critique magazines like Outland and Right Click Save, JPG Canons, and incredible discord servers are seen as the pioneers that truly built true NFT memetic culture.
We’ll be back, eventually. In the meantime I get to do some (personal opinion-based) angry newslettering, right?