By: chorne (founder of Filta)

Being a visual artist has always come with limitations. If you were doing physical art - the cost of materials, space, distribution, etc. were so expensive that it's almost impossible to make a living unless you're selling your work for thousands of dollars. This obviously comes with another problem: being able to show your work to enough people that can 1) actually afford your work and 2) want to buy it. Hundreds of years ago this meant that most artists worked full-time for wealthy families. Today it means most artists cluster their work in galleries where the artist take-home rate is only 50%.

Digital art should have solved this. You no longer have the cost of materials, space, or distribution. Instead you beam your artwork to any of the billions of people on the internet instantly for free. The new problem: nobody was willing to buy a jpeg for thousands of dollars. Instead artists tried to make up the difference with scale by selling access to their art for a few bucks and hoping that thousands of people enjoyed the work. It's not a great system - but it's the best we had.

The first time we started seeing a shift was with games. The platform itself would enforce scarcity of rare/unique/legendary items that everyone wanted but nobody could get. Suddenly people were paying thousands of dollars of digital items in MMOs and games like CS:GO. However - these were closed platforms. The gaming companies were the only ones creating and distributing the work. Independent artists were left out in the cold.

The introduction of the blockchain and NFTs meant that there was a global platform that anyone could build on top of that enforced scarcity. This means any artist can sell their work for a high dollar amount even if the audience for that work is extremely small. For once - scale isn't necessary to make a living.

The NFT boom has sent money to artists in some of the most rural locations on Earth. For some of these artists selling a piece for $1000 is fundamentally life changing. It cannot be understated how important this is for artists and how they make a living.

But

We live in a 3D world that is rapidly collapsing digital and physical together. My opinion is that 3D art will be more important to people than 2D art within the next 10 years. That the NFT boom has skipped over a huge swath of the 3D art community seems like the most obvious and glaring hole in the ecosystem. Someone should plug that hole.....and that's us.

We're starting with filters - but it's much much bigger than that.