You admit that art can be high value - and everyone who believes art can be worth millions is a "status-wanker" apparently - so therefore NFTs can be high value. Or is it only physical art that can have worth, but digital images cannot?

This is what drives everyone crazy - the art market itself is irrational. NFTs are the same thing, but digitized and hyper efficient.

I can Ctrl-C Ctrl-V bits that will resolve to the exact same MD5. I cant do that with the physical Mona Lisa.

I agree the art world is stupid, but using that as a justification for NFTs is also, exactly if not more stupid

It doesn't really matter if it's exact or not. People know that some NFT that cost $$$ can be copied, they don't care.

I don't think he meant is as a justification, just that the phenomenon is similar.

Of course art has value... to society. That isn't the same thing as it being "worth $x", a statement that only makes sense in the context of scarcity economics.

In that sense yes, only physical[0] art has a dollar value determined by supply and demand because the supply is infinite when we're talking about information. An NFT's supposed "value" comes from the perversion of a post-scarcity space by artificially introducing scarcity in the form of cryptographic certificates. NFT proponents tell you that cryptographic certificate is somehow related to the art, but it isn't. That's an illusion. I can create an NFT that also points to the same art your NFT points to and we'd need non-cryptographically-secure non-decentralized context to know which one is legit, so even the point of selling to status-wankers doesn't make sense to me.

[0] if we ever get some kind of replicator technology that can perfectly duplicate a physical object, then that all goes away. Hell, I don't even personally really believe in it because I've spent a lot of time thinking about the Ship of Theseus and what it means.