NFT buyers purchased art they never inspected as format speculation

Evidence

Beeple, an outsider to the traditional art world, curated Everydays as a montage of five thousand sketches and digital images. It included a “gender-swapped Captain Crunch rebranded as ‘Cap’n Bitch’ ” and graphic renderings of a large-breasted Donald Trump in S&M gear dominating an anthropomorphized COVID virus. One of its buyers, Anand Venkateswaran, admitted he hadn’t even looked through the images before purchasing. For Venkateswaran and his partner Vignesh Sundaresan of the Singapore-based cryptocurrency company Metapurse, the content was irrelevant. They saw Everydays as a milestone in the burgeoning world of non-fungible tokens (NFTs), a digital format they believed would revolutionize art ownership. “This is going to be a billion-dollar piece someday,” Venkateswaran claimed. — W. David Marx, Blank Space, 719

Categorization

• XREF: Strong counterpoint to Milgrom’s reputation mechanisms — buyers accept content-blind purchase because the format signal replaces taste.
• SEED: Article angle: content-blind buying as the reductio of omnivore taste — what happens when the signifier fully detaches from the signified.