NFTs
Out of context: Reply #703
- Started
- Last post
- 849 Responses
- utopian-2
Why do all NFTs look the same?
Notes on the aes­thet­ics of spec­u­la­tionA fig­ure pulled from Minecraft, Minions, Fortnite, Looney Tunes, DeviantArt por­trai­ture, the Are ya win­ning son meme, cor­po­rate il­lus­tra­tion, or some other slice of the American ver­nac­u­lar is shown in three-quar­ter por­trait on a field of bright colour, look­ing in­dif­fer­ent.
The fig­ure is dec­o­rated with ref­er­ences to pop­u­lar en­ter­tain­ment (Harley Quinn’s base­ball bat, the three-eyed fish from The Simpsons, the float­ing orb of wa­ter from The Last Airbender, the face mask from Mad Max, Yugi-Yo’s hair, Venom’s teeth), pop­u­lar con­sump­tion (bum bags, hood­ies, puffer jack­ets, sneak­ers, vapes, tinted glasses, branded head­phones, gold jew­ellery, take­out food con­tain­ers), and crypto-spe­cific sym­bols (laser eyes, di­a­monds, and cur­rency icons).
The im­age is ei­ther a vec­tor draw­ing or 3d-rendered, but in ei­ther case there is lit­tle sug­ges­tion of depth; every el­e­ment is evenly lit and de­picted in sharp de­tail as if it were pressed right against the im­age sur­face. There is a love for vi­sual de­tail: every hair is pre­cisely de­lin­eated, every piece of gold is pol­ished, and cloth is care­fully draped, lasers glow.
This de­scrip­tion cov­ers most non-fun­gi­ble to­kens at the top of OpenSea (the biggest web­site for buy­ing and sell­ing NFTs) on any given day. Why do all these im­ages look so alike?