Carlos Fentanes

Can you imagine the perfect world where every human can help each other and don’t try to take advantage of the situation?

No negotiation or bargain, just yes or no about buying a service or a product?

In a perfect world you don’t even need money to make a transaction, everybody will have “credit”, from Latin word “creditum”, believe. I believe in you, you believe in me, that’s credit.

Credit, etymologically it means “Believe”, so when I say: “I give you credit” I’m saying, “I believe in you”. That’s my ideal world but then I awake from my dream, check my Instagram and I have a direct message waiting to be opened, then I realize that is a new Art Collector, I check his profile and it seems that he has a lavish lifestyle with yachts, expensive watches, travels around the world to exotic places and exotic meals. He wants to buy 4 of my photos on Instagram for 5 ETH each that is around USD$9,500 each.

Can you imagine a collector going shopping in a gallery and before the gallery manager give him a price he offers 10X more the price? That sounds ridiculous. You’ll never go to a gallery and give them a blank check for a screenshot from Instagram, I’m mean a Screenshot, that’s what they are asking in exchange for the equivalent of almost USD$10,000. Too good to be truth. My most expensive artwork available in Artsy is far less than that, so imagine how ridiculous it sounds.

Most of the scams came to me in the form of a DM from Instagram asking me to sell one of the images that I upload on it as NFT and then offering a stratospheric amount of money for them. How can somebody take advantage of a person in this manner? That is the society where we live now. Credit? No, you start to filter your messages and collect them as false sells.

These days I have started to lose my faith on Instagram, Facebook and their online transactions, it’s not that they’re bad, actually it’s great when it works but usually in 99% of the cases is just another scam. Everyday I receive more and more DMs and emails asking me to sell or show my works here and there just to realize later that it’s a scam so, now, my credit score for these sites is in the best circumstances 50/50.