Polymarket and Philosophy by Simon Denny at Artforum

Now even faster speculation on art as an asset was possible. One could buy and flip NFTs several times a minute without worrying about annoying things like shipping and import tax. The NFT market could be much more responsive to—and expressive of—speculative demand. Seeking new crypto money, Christie’s and Sotheby’s cut all other legitimizing actors out of the loop with NFTs, elevating what might previously have been categorized as illustration, graphic art, or a social media meme to the status of fine art. The auction house endorsed the new asset form, and the asset’s price, in turn, made the institution appear responsive to an emergent cultural power. The tight loop between capital, asset issuing, and auction-as-legitimizing-engine echoed Polymarket’s recursive news-and-market-making cycle. […]

All crypto is literally new money—financial value that didn’t exist before Bitcoin. Legitimation of NFTs by blue-chip auction houses is a counter-elite victory over the cultural values embedded in the art assets previously sold off by auction houses, institutions that have not seriously courted new markets since their 1970s push to attract investors beyond a more traditional “connoisseur” class.

Largely over my head, but a fair account of the modern origins of prediction markets, featuring Robin Hanson. The upshot, to my untrained ear, suggests that crypto decentralized (and made explicit the racket of) what was previously a gate-kept fine art market.