DAN Management Distinguished Lecture - Money, Possessions, and Ownership in the Metaverse: NFTs, Cryptocurrencies, Web3 and Wild Market

Money, Possessions, and Ownership in the Metaverse: 
NFTs, Cryptocurrencies, Web3 and Wild Market 

Distinguished Lecturer: 
Russell Belk, 

York University Distinguished Research Professor, 
Royal Society of Canada Fellow, 
and Kraft Foods Canada Chair in Marketing at the 
Schulich School of Business in York University 

Discussant: 
Douglas Cumming, 
DeSantis Distinguished Professor of 
Finance and Entrepreneurship at the 
College of Business, Florida Atlantic University 

Our understandings of money, possessions, and ownership are all changing dramatically as 
consumption becomes digital and virtual. The Metaverse is an imagined future space where these 
building blocks of neoliberal production and consumption are delinked. We examine these changes 
through the affordances of cryptocurrencies, algorithmic collectibles, and NFTs. We seek to 
disambiguate these efforts at disintermediation through online auctions and speculation. We present 
practical implications for artists, art institutions, buyers, and investors. We theorize new forms of 
ownership with fractional ownership and fractionalized property rights. And we seek to understand why 
some consumers pay astronomical prices for digital art that includes simple and often silly artwork with 
limited property rights. To do so we distinguish alternate, but sometimes overlapping, buyer motivations 
in the wild world of crypto art as we purportedly move toward the Metaverse. 

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