If you were certain an NFT you were buying was not fraudulent and was created by the artist would you still think it's a shit way of supporting them? Is it bad that they have an additional way to make money on top of commissions, Patreon, and merch?
Not what I was trying to say at all, I'm saying that NFT tech is good because the default option is that the artist gets royalties and this happens probably >95% of the time?
I think I felt compelled to mention that people send it anyway because it's good behavior and not all scams/crimes people say it is. In general I think the royalty thing is just one nice bonus of using smart contracts
Not sure what you mean exactly by commercial art pursuits? I'd say about 99% of NFT projects are garbage but I'm a fan of artblocks (https://www.artblocks.io/).
I can talk more about how the system works if you are interested, but some established generative artists have created projects on their platform and have made more than they could before web3.
What makes it a shit way of supporting artists? I have seen some fraud like you describe, but I think it makes a lot of sense for digital only artists.
Royalties are built into marketplace smart contracts. Individuals can do P2P trades where the artist doesn't receive any royalty but this doesn't happen very often. Anecdotally, it typically only happens on large deals and people who do a P2P trade often send the artist their royalty anyway (but still benefit from not paying the OpenSea fees for example)