NFTs (non-fungible tokens) are a tacky, boring fungus with no real cultural value – Laura Waddell

Could there be anything more hollow, more devoid of substance and meaning, than the NFT craze?

Gold-plated souvenir cryptocurrency coins arranged by a screen displaying an NFT (non-fungible token) logo (Picture: Justin Tallis/AFP via Getty Images)

Celebrities who have jumped on the NFT fad, making a quick buck from those with more money than sense, give little impression they even fully understand what they’re hawking.

Had celebrity NFT sellers not the responsibility of fully understanding what they put their name to, shilling to impressionable followers, their general air of shoddy comprehension might be more forgivable.

Rare is the person whose eyes don’t glaze over when systems of blockchain and digital currency are explained to them. NFTs are not only tacky, but fundamentally boring. Congratulations if you’ve ever gotten to the end of an explainer without drifting off.

Although NFT news is often covered in entertainment and arts and culture sections, all because some B-lister bought an NFT of a cartoon giraffe or somesuch, this is marketing spin.

NFTs draw not on a background of artistic value, nor do much that is particularly interesting with digital culture and intellectual property rights (other than getting away with it).

No, NFTs are a fungus from the realm of finance whose spores have spread across pop culture. Beneath the glossy skin of an NFT, however packaged, no matter which subculture aimed at, is the soullessness of investing in an onion-skin thin veneer.

Ownership of anything at elite levels of trading, art included, is often at its core about the direction of money. In pretending to be a cultural event of any depth, the NFT craze – crafted from the deeply unsatisfying, obscure and bloodless medium of digital file ownership – instead reveals the hollowness of high-rolling, money-making schemes.

Behind the curtain, barely drawn as it is, is a huge let down. Making the already moneyed more money is the primary point, the product itself second; and the product has never been flimsier.

NFTs are ideally suited to this age of benumbed surrealism. They are pitched to customers for whom digital peacocking is of primary importance, attracted to planting their pixelated flag on a celebrity-linked property, while those making money off the fools who click ‘like’.

The craze for ‘non-fungible tokens’ is like many luxury fads of the past; in them is nothing more meaningful, more meritorious, more muscular than the thin, sharp spikes of economic charts before they flatline.

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