NO NFTs

I’M NOT a fan of social media.

If it happens that you find me on them it’s just in order to showcase my doodles, paintings, music or books. Other than that, I barely interact with so called friends and similar, preferring to keep otherwise my contacts.
My lack of responsiveness to likers, commenters and – most of all – followers is maybe the reason of the quite moderate number of these last ones. As a matter of fact, I never embraced the idiocy of follow back regardless of real interest – which is, by the way, the kind of behaviour strongly promoted by the very platforms themselves.
This is quite evident on such digital little places as Instagram.
Other than the usual promotion-seeking crap that I immediatly delete, recently a new wave of semi-fraudulent comments has risen to prominence.
This coincided with the widespread of the new tech-toy for art-plus-finance enthusiasts: the NFTs plague.

Not For This, sorry

“NFTs are just crap, so please don’t ask me for them”

This is the line I wrote as warning panel on my page at the very early requests of such revolutionary, exciting way to sell art, which is nor revolutionary neither exciting.
The opposite, instead: it’s a reactionary, selfish closure against what art is – or should be – for more than a century – specially after Walter Benjamin’s The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.
Please note that this form of trade adds nothing to artwork’s value in itself, it’s just a virtual and very volatile market value as long as this market holds on. It’s just to certify the propriety, the ownership of an original piece – something that digitally simply makes no sense. A way to say “hey folks, watch and envy, this is mine“.
If the issues of this un-revolutionary technology would be limited to this, it only went to add up to the bunch of nonsenses of disturbed self-inflated egos and similar deranged people. Unfortunately, it has huge drawbacks for everyone on the planet, even for those, like myself, that don’t give a [you fill the blank] to NFTs.
Yes, ’cause, as all the blockchain technology-based stuff such as cryptocurrencies and assorted sillynesses are, NFTs are a hungry devouring-energy monster in nice disguise.

“Hey, you could be a millionaire!”

Despite my unmistakable warning on the doorstep of my Instagram and facebook pages about my art and even after I begun writing “> NO NFTs <” in each and every post, comments asking for NFTs – and even direct messages requests – don’t stop coming. This not only goes to prove once more that people don’t read or, sometimes, think when on the web, but that this Non-Fungible-Tokens art-buying trend is fundamentally stupid.

I have even received some messages pointing out that I’d be a real moron if I’m not selling NFTs. You could earn millions!

Now, it’s a well known fact that the most part of these NFTs buying proposals are actually scams (like commission requests have once been): luring you into paying a NTFs-making Platform, then asking for money to pay some distribution fees or other taxes, and finally disappearing without buying even a small pixel.

So, what?

I don’t expect anything special from this post. The (fake)-NFTs-buyers will continue to spam their request without understanding that here they have taken a dead-end alley. But if just one of them, reading these lines, will realize and stop pestering me and the rest of the world and get a life, that’ll be good.

Maybe I’d reward her/him by turning this very post in a NFT and send it to them.

For free!

-mb

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Check my art on Rise Art.