Artists bare honest opinion about NFTs

At an Australia Blockchain Week session, panelists discussed how the NFT business has benefited from direct contacts between artists and followers.

According to artist Danielle Weber, who spoke at the Australia Blockchain Week conference, the nonfungible token (NFT) art business has blossomed into a “wonderful cycle” because of the relationship artists have with their audience.

Weber appeared on a panel titled “Pushing the Boundaries of NFT Utility and Art — Homegrown Spotlight” on Wednesday. He discussed how the nonfungible token ecosystem could bring artists and their followers closer. She emphasized the fact that such proximity benefits both artists and fans:

“What we’re seeing in this space is a magnificent cycle. We have a close relationship with our audience […], so we know what they want, and they inspire us to create work that is authentic to ourselves and our profession.”

The NFT facility exudes a sense of belonging to fans from the moment one walks in. From an NFT project, a collector can join a Discord channel or start following an artist or a collection’s account. Collectors can express their thoughts and receive real-time information from content creators about the direction their art is headed through these platforms. As Weber put it, “thinking more broadly about how we might give back to our supporters” is possible with such an arrangement.

She believes that this two-way connection between artists and fans has “eliminated the middlemen and galleries” and that it “forces you to stand up as an artist” and be “at the forefront of your project.”

According to Matty, another panellist and founder of the “Metakey” NFT collection, the process that established the apparent give-and-take cycle in the NFT realm took time to build. “Every Discord had like 200 members, and if it reached 1,000, it was a big project,” he stated when he first entered the NFT market four years ago.

The NFT industry currently outsells the traditional art auction market in terms of sales. According to DappRadar, NFT sales reached $23.1 billion last year, while conventional non-NFT art auction sales reached $16.8 billion, according to the International Business Times.

Matty credits the NFT space’s growth to a small number of catalysts, such as Dapper Labs’ NBA Top Shot NFT collection, which “built something really easy to understand, and it clicked.” He believes that more catalysts will emerge in the gaming and creative industries as NFTs become more mainstream.

The NBA Top Shot discord channel had over 224,000 members at writing.