New Book Review: NFT Your Art

Title: NFT Your ARt 

Author: David Elrad

Date: 2022

Length: 192 e-pages, not including publisher or ISBN inormation

Quote: "An NFT can be literally anything you can put into a digital format—including musical compositions, drawings, or videos."

"NFT" is short for "non-fungible token," a high-tech way of storing data. Owners of digitalized content, including pictures of three-dimensional arts and crafts, can pay to have their content stored on a "block chain" system that theoretically pays them and only them each time someone buys a copyof their NFT. In theory the "block chain" will preserve your content and your right to it forever. 

In practice...well, have you tried changing your Paypal account to a different computer lately? 

Like other recent technological developments, NFT will be fun for a few people as long as it's  a hobby for a few people, and offers a world of opportunity to bullies, dictators, thieves, and other conscience-challenged types if it ever becomes widespread. You're reading this on a computer so you should already know about the benefits and dangers of making anything digital.

Elrad is definitely in favor of NFT, raving about how much money it's made for artists and inventors. Not everything preserved in museums is painting or sculpture, Not everything preserved as NFT needs to be a painting or sculpture, either. NFT's can include game tokens and souvenis, including 3-D printable clothes or shoes. Jack Dorsey, founder of Twitter, preserved the first tweet ever sent (his, saying "Just setting up my Twitter") as a NFT and sold it for a large price. Audio and video files can become NFT's. So can text--instructions, recipes, poems, blogs, or whole books.

What may be the most valuable part of the book now is likely to be quaint by 2024. That's a detailed discussion of different sites you can use to "NFT your art," why people choose one or another, how each site collect its fees ad delivers your commissions. I don't consider myself a geek, and this section made sense to me. If you own a computer, play online games, design digital art even for a relatively old (not NFT) site like Zazzle, you may not realize how geeky you sound to really low-tech people. 

Elrad  also considers the question of exactly how, once you select a system, you're going to be making money from your productions. A drawing or animation of your product--socks, luggage, arty guitar picks--can be considered art, and some NFT communities like Discord can help connect you to rich sponsors and celebrity mentors, but in order to make millions from your art you have to have created something people want to buy. You have to pay to register and "mint" each NFT piece, so it would be foolish to rush every doodle you've ever done into the NFT  market. Take the time to make NFT pieces as good as the work you take to real-world shows. 

Your computer won't do all the work of making you a genius artist, but some of the new apps may help. Even old cell phones that didn't take videos may offer special effects that make those low-resolution photos look different, if not beautiful  Newer apps that have more memory offer more possibilities for cropping, enlarging, color filtering, brightening, darkening, or converting photos into cartoons.  You can animate drawings with some apps, or combine elements from different pictures with others. Some apps specialize in isolating elements of a picture to be recombined with others, or matching screen swipes to musical tones to allow you to compose background music synchronized with animation. 

In the last few weeks some e-friends of mine have frittered away hours of slow-recovery time with a free-to-use web site called Craiyon, the "mini" version of a sophisticated app-in-progress called DALL-E. The system automatically generates images created by mixing images it finds on the Internet. Human faces tend to be spliced into images that don't look human, and searches like "blue jeans on a cow" yielded images of pictures of blue jeans stuck on sides of cows, but images the system generates for abstract phrases can be oddly appealing. Craiyon's free site, a sort of promotion for Dalle, has come to exist during the time NFT Your Art was being published. In another year or two there will probably be several more new "artist's assistant" sites that aren't in this book, but the book is still a valuable guide to the sites that existed last spring!

There are tricks that will help NFT pieces sell. Elrad discusses tricks that worked for some users, like using popular relevant keywords to describe NFTs on lists, or designing NFTs that have practical value for purchasers. There are no guarantees that any amount of investment of time, money, and ingenuity will boost any creative work to the top of the sales charts, but because NFT is new it offers higher than usual possibilities for artists to make sales.

If you do creative work with a computer, NFT Your Art is worth having as a current reference work and checklist. I don't recommend reading it naively and rushing to post everything in your studio on Open Sea. I do recommend using it as a general guide to designing and marketing low-investment work, and deciding which if any of your collection you may want to invest in marketing as NFT.