NFTs are not just a way to pay for pretentious art. They simply extend the basic idea of cryptocurrency. Cryptocurrency is a way to prove that you were given certain funds, without having to hold on to paper bills (and having to prove their authenticity). Remember that money itself has no intrinsic value, it is like a part-ownership coupon or an IOU from a central bank. The property of cryptocurrency is that they are all interchangeable aka "fungible". NFTs extend this idea to unique items which are not fungible - so you can prove you own a particular copy of a painting without having to actually have the painting in your vault and demonstrate it to anyone who questions whether you really own it.
NFTs are basically a cryptographically verifiable ownership certificate for individual goods that are not interchangeable with other similar goods. You could have NFTs showing your ownership of your house, your car, your vacuum cleaner (presumably that particular vacuum cleaner with the serial number baked into the NFT), your dog...
You might be realizing that having a certificate does not physically prevent me from violating your ownership. For example, you still have to lock your car, and even if you have the dead I can still hop in and steal it. It is the same with houses and vacuums and dogs. So the ownership certificate (the title in this case) is not a magic incantation, it is merely a formality. But that formality allows you to file a police report and have the state recover your property. Basically, it doesn't matter who you or I think is the rightful owners of things, it matters what the government (ie. bad dudes with guns) thinks because they are the ones, unlike you or me, who will enforce their own opinion on who owns what and what they can do with it.
Currently there is not much legal recognition of NFTs, so you might wonder if they're worthless, since nobody will respect your NFT-based ownership. But they can still be worth something via an expectation that they will be observed in the future. This is also why people buy shares of land on the moon - obviously they can't go to the moon right now, but their thesis is that one day the government will officially open the moon for sale and their claims will be respected. With cryptocurrency, early on many people said that it's worthless because no store accepts them and you can't buy anything with them. Today, you can buy even houses and cars with bitcoin. So those people who bought up some and saved them can now enjoy the benefit of their savings.
The problem with NFTs is that the NFT itself is not unique - unless the underlying good is digital you can make multiple NFTs of the same object. Which NFT is the "correct" one then? Basically, the entire crypto community must agree on some common practice for generating legitimate NFTs and how to judge legitimate ones. When that happens, they become an actual basis for ownership rather than just a potential one. The process can be accelerated by the government blessing a certain NFT mechanism as the "official" one and promising to protect it with force - but this is not necessary if there is critical mass of people voluntarily behaving as if that one NFT system is legitimate. For the present, I believe it NFTs are more valued for:
- The potential future implications as to the ownership of the object
- The inherent value of the certificate itself, being a technological novelty (this is similar to how collectible coins or documents can trade far above their face value)
