West burst on the spotlight with his debut album The College Dropout. He had proven his ability before by producing songs with media mogul Jay-Z and creating beats for the latter’s product house, Rock-a-Fella. Since the beginning, West had a penchant for collaborating with big artists and got features like Jamie Foxx, Elton John, Chris Martin and Adam Levine, among others, for his College trilogy consisting of his initial three works - The College Dropout, Late Registration, and Graduation. One of the most influential trilogies in hip-hop, West’s production helped push the genre beyond its then emphasis on bling music.Over the next decade, West would continue his domination over hip-hop with his album 808s and Heartbreaks influencing the auto-tune flow prevalent in music today through rappers like Playboy Carti, Juice WRLD, Lil Nas X , among others. This helped him move to establishing new relationships with younger artists like Kid Cudi, Rihanna and Drake. Around this period, West began wanting to dip his toes into fashion. He started with a Louis Vuitton collaboration in 2009, with the shoe christened after his barber. The commercial success of that shoe led to the launch of the ‘Air Yeezy’, a collaboration with Nike, its first with a non-athlete. The collaboration continued for a few years until Kanye claimed that the company was not paying him enough, called out Nike’s CEO in a concert, and switched over to Adidas.With Adidas, Kanye got creative control and ownership while Adidas handled production. By late 2016 however, Kanye was in massive debt due to his constant unsuccessful attempts to launch a fashion line. He was saved by this deal with Adidas which saw him retain an unprecedented 15 percent of royalties.

In comparison, Michael Jordan retains 5 percent with his Nike ‘Air Jordan’ deal. The success of the brand led to him becoming a billionaire and making 150 million dollars per year through royalties and booming music sales, including 12 million from listening parties alone for his latest full album Donda, a eulogy to his mother who passed away in 2007.His business success has emboldened him to take more business risks, such as his recent foray into competing with streaming services by launching his customisable music player, the ‘Donda Stem Player’. This series of commercial successes have masked his failed ventures. His ability to come back from controversy has come from not only his music but also his business prowess, setting him apart from many other artists.In 2022, Kanye West and his wife Kim Kardashian separated, with the latter entering into a relationship with comedian Pete Davidson. West’s subsequent lashing out online sparked public concern. He had numerous mental health struggles, including a previous bipolar disorder diagnosis. His albums addressed how he himself was unsure how he felt, with his having frequent manic episodes. He has publicly refused to take medication. Post the divorce and what he saw as his family being taken away, West took to social media to begin attacking people, including members of the board of Adidas. All of this culminated in his making anti-Semitic remarks on social media, getting him locked out of his account and losing almost all his brand deals and money. His empire had fallen.Whether West can resurrect his empire depends squarely on him and whether he takes accountability for his actions. Coming back from this point seems difficult and frankly, improbable, but West has shown that he can never be taken lightly in business.

Let’s get started with some really basic questions, the kind you wouldn’t ask a finance bro in your wildest dreams.What are NFTs?
An NFT, or Non-Fungible Token, is a record on a blockchain for a certain digital asset, with its ownership being recorded in that blockchain.What is a blockchain?
For those of you who have been spared the trauma of exposure to the exponentially evolving and super-cool world of digital currencies and assets, a blockchain is a public, digital ledger with consistently added records, called blocks. Each block has a hash of the previous one, transaction data and a timestamp, which proves that the transaction and the block itself were created simultaneously. These blocks form a chain since each one consists of information about the one before it. The chain itself is linked together via cryptography.PS – Cryptography is all about preventing third parties from reading private messages or information. You have WhatsApp to thank for keeping those risky texts lowkey, because they are end-to-end encrypted, using cryptography.In case we’ve disrupted your chain of thought with this chain of blocks and techy/crypto jargon, let’s get back to basics.Non-Fungible essentially means irreplaceable. For example, consider Match Attax football trading cards. If you trade the 2010 Pele, you’d get a 2021/22 Autograph Edition Ronaldo or Jersey Edition Messi – something different. It’s the same with NFTs.But NFTs can be anything that’s digital or made digital – a picture of a pigeon you took in the stall bathroom, Professor Harris’s brain downloaded as AI or a collection of Kalinga tweets.Right now, it’s all about selling digital art. NFTs are purportedly the ‘future of art collecting,’ from really famous pieces like Oceanfront by Beeple to This Changed Everything by Sir Tim Berners-Lee.Now that you (hopefully) know what NFTs are, we can get to the actual point of this article, which is to bust some of the myths surrounding them that we know you’ve heard:NFTs consist only of digital art:
We’ve touched on this earlier in the article – NFTs can be of anything digital. Of course, this begs the question of the standard of NFTs, but remember, there’s no accounting for taste.NFTs can be easily copied:
This one is slightly tricky. Yes, you can copy a digital anything as many times as you feel like it, like the art that is included with the NFT. The NFT itself, though, can’t be copied because it is the entry or record of the transaction for the digital piece on the blockchain. This means that the buyer gets ‘ownership’ of the work or asset.NFTs are vehicles or conduits for transactions concerning the anything digital asset in question. It’s a lot like the Annabelle doll being a conduit for the demon, and not the demon itself. Another quick clarification: The buyer doesn’t get copyright or reproduction rights – as intellectual property, the art with the NFT belongs to the artist.Basically, you can stick a print of the Mona Lisa on your dorm room wall for aesthetic Instagram stories, but it’s still the property of the Louvré. (It was probably slightly questionable to give an example where ‘ownership’ belongs to an institution and not the artist, but Da Vinci is dead and we really just hope you got our point.)NFTs are unique – in that each one is a specific entry on the blockchain different from all existing or future entries. It could be like the Beeple video, where there’s only one definitive version, or like the Pele 2010 Card, where there are multiple numbered copies. Just remember that each of these copies is a different NFT – different entries on the blockchain.

NFTs are worthless:
That’s a very deep question, bro. Technically, NFTs function like any other speculative financial asset (yes, we’re looking at your high-risk, high-reward Vadilal stocks that you bought because you like ChocoBar.) If you buy one, and the odds are in your favour, its value could increase one day, and you can sell it, earning profit.As an investor, and as a broke college student in particular, you might be attracted to exploiting the potential of NFTs as speculative assets. The accessibility to NFTs has created an openness behind their ‘trade’ for them to be subsumed into a corporation-oriented universe, for instance, the Metaverse. However, the phenomenon of corporations or institutions attempting to garner a monopoly on creativity is not even remotely novel. Despite the negative connotations of ‘profiteering’ on the heels of NFTs, they have radically changed and challenged the field of contemporary art, and their circulatory capacity as assets has opened discourse to larger questions.What’s crucial to consider is that cryptocurrency is not legal everywhere, and is still ‘stuck’ within the blockchain, particularly in India where total regulation is yet to occur. While NFTs are still acknowledged by India as taxed digital assets, they are heavily dependent on the market value of cryptocurrency. Therefore, while NFTs are still in a speculative limbo, they are definitely here to stay. As of July 2022, the NFT market is growing at a CAGR of 35.27% and is expected to register an incremental growth of USD 147.24 billion between 2021 and 2026. Also, it is expected to form a major sector of the overall risk-generated economy.The CEO of JP Morgan Chase, Jamie Dimon, recently stated that digital currencies have no intrinsic value, and critics have openly called it a Ponzi scheme, which it very well might be. However, as of February 2022, JP Morgan is the first bank to open in the metaverse where shopping is possible through cryptocurrency and NFTs.There’s nothing wrong with being in it for the money, and not getting it right sometimes.More than just profit, though – keep reading, we know this is a business publication – you can financially support artists you like, who can then make more cool stuff. NFTs have definitely expanded the general scope for creativity, giving graphic designers more opportunities for recognition, without introducing too many intermediaries or middlemen. For example, platforms like OpenSea, the leading NFT marketplace, make the minting process (creation of NFTs) straightforward, directly addressing the creator. The promise of democratic exhibition, sale and resale is an incentive for creators, who in turn then enrich the overall realm of creativity, but also exponentially increases the opportunities for you to see and own even cooler stuff.So apart from the potential financial gain from the NFT as an asset, you get fries with it, in the form of basic usage rights (make it your DP on WhatsApp when you’re in a mood) and ownership rights, because you have the blockchain entry to prove it.In conclusion, we hope that we’ve made the whole NFT conversation a little easier for you to join in. Whether the NFT market soars or crashes over the next few minutes or years, it’s time to start caring about the different ways you can consume art and accumulate wealth as our world becomes increasingly digital. Even if you think the Mona Lisa trumps Jimmy Fallon, you have to admit that NFTs have given rise to algorithmic generated art with its own history and challenges.Next time you see a Bored Ape sweatshirt at the club, give it a second thought.

The above work, titled “Théâtre D’opéra Spatial”, was recently awarded first place in the digital art category at the Colorado State Fair’s fine arts competition. The awardee, a video game designer named Jason Allen, said he spent 80 hours on the piece. The catch? He didn’t really draw it, in the ordinary sense of the word. Allen used Midjourney, a paid artificial intelligence tool that produces an image based on a set of words given to it by the user. While similar applications like Nightcafe, DALL-E 2 and Google’s DeepDream are either not available for the general public or subject to pricing, there are some generators that everyone can use for free like Stable Diffusion and Dream by WOMBO to create unique artworks. AI-generated art has been around for quite some time, but due to recent advancements, it has entered popular discourse. How exactly does this seemingly magical technology work, and what does it mean for art and the industry at large?There are many ways of creating an image through AI, and all of them would require a detailed technical explanation to be understood properly. However, we can get a rudimentary understanding of a popular model, such as Stable Diffusion. Taking a very simplistic approach, it first looks at billions of pictures online along with their captions, gradually identifying patterns between words and the images. Then, the diffusion algorithm starts with random “noise”, which resembles TV static, and gradually reduces the level of noise several times to get closer to the text that it was given, and then gives us the final image. For a more in-depth explanation, readers can find an illustrated introduction to how it works. Stable Diffusion and many other art generators are based on a vast dataset, which is often scraped from publicly available images and their descriptions on the Internet. A problematic aspect of this is that the dataset gets filled with NSFW, distressing, triggering and discriminatory content since there is close to no filter on the kind of content being used. This can unwittingly get reflected in the final product. It reinforces various social biases as well, since most of the data images have English descriptions and as a result, “white and western cultures are often set as the default” as is the case with Stable Diffusion and the dataset on which it was trained.While typing in the prompt, users can specify if they would like the final piece to be in the style of a particular artist. People’s work can be used indiscriminately by softwares to create artwork without their prior permission or even knowledge. This has caused debate over plagiarism and copyright since a living artist’s work is being used as input to other pieces of work, frequently without the original artist getting credit. Greg Rutowski, a Polish illustrator, has had his name used tens of thousands of times by users typing in art prompts. “I realized that after a while, I can have trouble looking for my images on Google because it will be flooded with AI,” Rutkowski said. “It was a future threat for my online portfolio.” He feels that all softwares should remove the works of living artists from their databases so as to not harm the prospects of upcoming creators.

While that seems unlikely, credit can be given to all those artists whose works were used to produce an AI-generated artwork. This too would be difficult to implement due to the massive number of images which could have been used as inspiration. According to Melissa Heikkilä, a pay-per-play model could be implemented resembling that of the movie and music industries. Under this, artists could get a slice of the pie everytime their art is used in an AI piece that was sold. Even so, the question of who gets credit for AI art is not limited to artists. Programmers and other people behind the brain of the AI are technically also responsible for the process that led to the final piece. Should they also be acknowledged? When Christie’s sold the AI-generated “Portrait of Edmond de Belamy” for $432,000, the proceeds went to the Obvious Collective, which had used an algorithm to create the piece. But neither the programmers who developed the algorithm nor the artists whose art was used as data in the algorithm were even recognised, let alone paid. Such questions are complex and the current legal framework will need to be updated to better accommodate the changes coming to the art industry, especially considering that AI-related art is fetching such enormous amounts of money.As for the issue of paying the artists, getting monetary compensation does not completely eliminate the larger problem AI poses for human artists: employment. The incomes of hundreds of thousands of large and small artists and illustrators working in the film, video game, advertising and publishing industries will be at risk. If non-artists could just type some words and get a book cover, birthday card, article cover picture or some abstract art, businesses would not want to hire people to do the same job, nor would artists be able to earn commissions at the same rate. The quality of every individual artwork would certainly not be at the same level as that of a human, but it would be enough for most purposes. This is true especially from a corporate viewpoint, taking into account the saved cost and the large volume of art that can be produced in a relatively small amount of time.Meanwhile, some have suggested that AI generators will not entirely replace artists and could even be beneficial for them. While AI art is impressive, it does not have the same intent as human artists and the final image often needs to be touched up by a human. Moreover, it can also be considered to be a tool for artists to use in their creative process or get inspired by the work it produces based on a prompt. Technological advancements have always happened in the field of art: think of Photoshop or any digital art tool, 3D printers or even the camera. AI art could be more of the same and artists may just have to adapt to the changing times. The issues surrounding AI art are extremely new, and ways to resolve them will only be seen in the coming years as AI becomes more widespread and we try to keep pace with the rapid changes it causes.