In this interview, Tara Harris, Head of Nifty Gateway Studio, shares her unique perspective on the evolving landscape of digital art and NFTs. With a background in traditional art markets, Harris offers a nuanced view of the challenges and opportunities presented by this innovative technology, discussing everything from ownership concepts to pricing models and the future of creativity in the digital art sector.

Can you please explain how the concept of ownership evolved in digital art with the advent of NFTs?

We’ve always played around with ownership in the digital realm when it came to gaming, skins online, or other icons that we use to represent ourselves digitally. But NFTs and blockchain technology really shifted that fundamentally. 

Instead of just the illusion of ownership, we were finally able to define ownership that could not be touched or changed once programmed. This unlocked a whole new era of financial freedom and accessibility globally, both in NFTs and, obviously, with crypto.

How does the NFT market address issues of authenticity compared to the traditional art market?

Coming from the art market, you typically rely on stories, documentation, stickers, and photographs. You attempt to use anything you can get your hands on to piece together a story about the origins and validity of art. Of course, the fact that tangible documents can be falsified makes it extremely difficult. 

NFTs totally eliminate all of it. The story is still essential, so all of it is valuable in the traditional art market. However, NFTs make things quite simple.

What do you think are the challenges for traditional artists in the NFT space?

There are a couple of challenges. First, being able to access the technology and figuring out how everything works and how you market yourself. But I think the even bigger challenge, which Nifty Gateway Studio is trying to tackle, is how you translate your ideas from physical goods to digital ones. 

Physical things have a lot of entry points for a viewer: texture, rich color, lighting, and three-dimensionality. In a digital space, there’s a whole new suite of tools and forms of expression. 

Crossing that bridge of how to get your ideas to leverage these digital tools and come to life through a digital idea and how to use these digital tools to expand the possibilities of your creative idea. I think bridging that gap is the most challenging thing for traditional artists. 

How do you think the recent crypto market volatility impacted the NFT industry? 

I think volatility is a natural part of any emerging market. The trends we see in the Web3 ecosystem at large are not different from those of other emerging technologies like the Internet or mobile phones. 

There’s always this extreme speculation and boom, and then it normalizes and rebalances. I think we’re just now getting into that rebalancing phase. Yes, people have been impacted by that, of course. 

But for us, we try to really focus on the product, business, value, and how it can continue to be sustainable and grow over a long period of time. We make an effort not to get too caught up in the frenzy.

How does the pricing model for NFTs differ from traditional art, especially when talking about limited editions and one-of-one pieces?

It is so different from traditional art. First, you have a lot more accessibility to the assets, and that really influences how we think about pricing strategies. In the traditional model, you need to get to a gallery or buy art online, but it’s really about identifying a third party that you trust and can buy from. 

Just getting access to the price is sometimes a huge barrier. Prices are not always listed, and sometimes you have to get into the actual gallery. It’s quite challenging just to get the price and information you need to make that decision. All of that pricing is normally tied up by one party, whether that’s the gallery or the estate of the artist who’s setting a piece. 

The reasoning behind the pricing and the value it offers you outside of the art are not usually well explained. On the other hand, artists may be a little more inventive with the way they price and edition items on NFTs because it’s such an accessible tool.

How do you see the relationship between digital and physical goods in the future?

We are in a place where we started off with NFTs versus the art market, and that was the big narrative. Then, it became about how we bridge NFTs into the physical realm. Yes, that’s very important – a lot of people need that physical touchpoint. 

In fact, I believe that there will be even more opportunities in the future. I don’t think we can continue to live in this dual state of one against the other, separating digital and physical art or separating conventional and NFT art. Ultimately, it’s just an act of creativity.

The future is something that we don’t fully know what it looks like. It will emerge and evolve as smart, creative artists and collectors come into this space and participate. I think we should be really focused on creating new forms of entertainment and art out of this, not necessarily so consumed with bridging and competition between them.

What lessons can the traditional art world learn from the NFT space and vice versa? What can the NFT market get from the traditional one?

When I consider what the conventional world can learn from the NFT world, I believe that the first and most important lesson is that there is a ton of unrealized creative potential here. We inhibit that creativity when we put too many restrictions on it. This inventiveness, in the case of NFTs, has had a really global effect.

Art can bring people together, regardless of their backgrounds or places of living. That can have really amazing and transformational results. That’s something the traditional art world might learn from. The conventional art world has functioned through barriers, gates, and a self-contained approach. Of course, that has commercial benefits, but occasionally, I wonder if it limits innovation.

Vice versa, the traditional art world is pretty amazing if you really think about it. It has existed in its current state for centuries and has done very well. It has figured out a playbook and how to assign value to subjective objects in an amazing way. 

I think the NFT art space could really take cues from that, just in how we think about value broadly and assign it, and get out of this trap of art as a commodity. In the traditional world, they have removed all the language around art being a commodity and elevated it to be something of value, which has a much greater personal, emotional, and ego impact than just purely a line item on an investment sheet.

What technological advancements in the NFT space are you most excited about for the future of digital art?

This is a totally personal opinion, but in the last couple of years, the NFT space, though it’s a very young industry, got really consumed with trading. It was all about trading and volume. 

How can you create a dynamic art piece that is digitally native but can live and breathe and have a life of its own in the physical realm? I think there’s a lot of innovation to be done there. I also think there’s a huge amount of innovation that needs to continue in smart contract development. 

That is an incredibly powerful tool, and we’ve only scratched the surface on unique royalty models, transfer of ownership, the dynamism of the NFTs, how they evolve over time, and what they react to—there’s just a lot to play with there. That’s really exciting.

How do you think we can attract more people, both creators and ordinary people, to the NFT space?

I think it starts by just finding maturity in the market. It’s a young market, and that comes with a lot of, we’ll call it, frayed edges. I think the more that we can find that maturity as businesses, the better. Looking introspectively at Nifty Gateway Studios, we’ve always tried really hard to toe the line and operate in what we kind of refer to as a Web 2.5 mode. 

That was a dirty word for a long time, but really, it’s an ethos of how we provide that stepping stone for people to safely enter this space and feel secure in the decisions that they’re making, and then go and explore the wild world of Web3. Web3 is wild, and that’s what makes it so tempting. 

Your normal consumer is not just going to dive into the deep end; they need a ladder or some stepping stones to get in safely and securely and build that confidence to explore it. So I think more partners and colleagues of ours in the space can help provide that by giving that stability and clarity of what we do, why you should feel good about it, and what you get out of it – just kind of breaking it down so it’s more accessible.

How do you foresee the state of the NFT market till the end of this year and the beginning of the next year?

I am really optimistic about the growth of the NFT market. I think it will look and feel unlike it ever has in its past. I don’t think we’ll see those crazy peaks and troughs that we saw in the early days of wild speculation that drove huge sales and huge volumes. But I think what we’ll see is healthy, steady growth of projects and participants, and that will just continue to pick up and grow over time.

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