Marble Cards and The Ship of Theseus: a Philosophical Study into NFTs

We've heard about this new craze.. Digitizing art, creating a tokenized version of a piece of history, selling the roster of NBA players for cryptocurrency. Suddenly the by-word is NFT. Non fungible token. The latest blockchain wonder.

To be truthful, I didn't have much knowledge of NFT until recently, and I thought that they were tradeable goods with valuation at cryptocurrency.

Now you're wondering: doesn't this article belong elsewhere? This is blockchain, this is cryptocurrency. Truth is, at the heart of the NFT lies a more fundamental issue and a history going as far back as the Renaissance, or older.

The great literary and visual artists like Michelangelo and Petrarch didn't subsist on the sale of their art. Each handcrafted work was a masterpiece and should be valued at a high price, but such as the reality of the times that the artist was willing to receive less to be paid for basic necessities.

But a few ducats worth of paintings will not feed an artist. He either finds work outside his art, or find a wealthy patron. Michelangelo was commissioned by Rome for his art. Noblemen commissioned artists for their work.

This, then, is how artists subsisted… through the patronage of the wealthy few. And it was a symbol of prestige to own such art work as it indicated you as a man of status.

So is the NFT such an artwork? It is true that many NFTs are works of art and valued at high crypto price, but it does a disservice to narrow NFTs to such a definition.

A concrete definition of such a concept needs an examination to one such NFT collection: Marble Cards. The idea is simple… every domain in the Internet has a page, and each page could be potentially minted as a card with its own unique background design. Only a few domains are available yet for minting, but the idea behind it is ambitious: curating the Internet. Art that is available to the layman, to be crafted at his own leisure.

There are, however, ethical considerations to ponder. While a page can be curated as a work of art, what if that page contains the Mona Lisa? Or a gallery of art works by an artist? Does the curated page belong to whoever curated it? And what of the art within? And what of a page that itself curates art? Does it become a curation of a curation?

We ever so slightly throw the car of our thoughts completely off road and to the latest episode of the series Wandavision. In one scene we are presented with two Visions: one reconstructed by the government and the other reconstructed from Wanda's memories. Which one was the real Vision?

One posits the thought experiment of the Ship of Theseus. Through the years a ship's planks are replaced to maintain it. When all of the planks are replaced, is it still the same ship? An addendum to this is if the planks are reassembled to make another ship, is that the true ship?

There is no real answer to this thought experiment, but in the episode they both agree that they are both not Vision, and both are Vision.

We arrive then to the point of our discussion: is the Marble Card that reconstitute the art work therefore the art work or is it not? And if it is, is it therefore owned by its original creator? We may arrive at the same conclusion which will hold us for now: yes, it is the same art work, but no, it is a different entity.

How then can we apply this to the identity of the NFT? Yes, artworks are sold as NFTs, but objects and maps and plots of lands and the NBA roster of players are not represented by the NFTs… They are, and they are not. A ship reconstituted has value of that ship, but is a different entity altogether.

The twist is that after the NFT is immortalized in the blockchain, it is destroyed altogether. The ship is destroyed, so is the ship of the blockchain the true ship?

This is how I shall send the thought experiment that is created by the NFT. The novel idea of Marble Cards is apparently not to curate the art, but the valuation of the art. Or perhaps, like a reconstitution, it is both the art and it is not.

For those who are interested and want to dive into the waters of this world, you can try to go to https://marble.cards