Finance & economics | What’s wrong with this picture?

Non-fungible tokens are useful, innovative—and frothy

The craze extends from digital art to sports clips and cat cartoons

No Everydays object

“EQUIVALENT VIII” by Carl Andre was a minimalist sculpture bought by Britain’s Tate Gallery in 1972. The Tate described the work as “a rectangular arrangement of 120 firebricks...altering the viewer’s relationship to the surrounding space”. The public called it a pile of bricks. A few years later newspapers execrated the gallery for having wasted brick-shaped wads of cash on the avant-garde work.

This article appeared in the Finance & economics section of the print edition under the headline “What’s wrong with this picture?”

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