> Not saying NFTs are not a sham
How do these two statements go hand in hand?
(1)Consider all the artists "unrecognized" during their lifetime; did their genius just get discovered after their deaths? No, it was just at that point their works were a limited commodity, and not well distributed yet, and so suddenly became good places to park wealth. That isn't to say there isn't good and interesting and thought provoking work being done, but it's definitely only loosely, if at all, correlated to price. A good artist with nothing else can expect to sell a custom painting for $1k, tops. A hack artist with a known PR person in the art world can get themselves selling them for hundreds of thousands, if not millions.
That's not really right, my wife is a painter without gallery representation who sells in $5k-$12k range. Through her I've met many other people in this "middle tier". A well connected gallery can get collector eyes on your art at fairs like Art Basel and further increase the price of paintings to the higher tens of thousands. Beyond that, there's a relatively small circle of prominent living artists selling for $100k-$1M; these are mostly talented hard working people with distinctive styles that find an eager collector audience. The tier beyond that is an even smaller group of "celebrity" artists -- which is maybe who you're referring to as "hack artists" since it includes some gimmicky work.
“Not saying apps are a sham”
… I don’t understand how those two sentences are contrary in your thinking. What do you see?
