NFT’s and art...
On the 11th of March Christie’s sold Beeple’s “The First 5000 Days” NFT for USD69, 346,250. NFT’s as collectable — no longer confined to the blockchain-based CryptoKitties game or NBA YouTube clips — as art to burst into the broader consciousness. A New York Times column was written and sold as an NFT (Kevin Roose: Why Did Someone Pay $560,000 for a Picture of My Column? NY Times Published March 26, 2021Updated April 29, 2021.) articles written in learned and not so learned journals — almost all focussed on the economic aspect of the sale.
Non-Fungible Tokens or NFTs use blockchain technology like Bitcoin. This and other cryptocurrencies are the most prominent examples of fungible tokens. That is if you send somebody a Bitcoin and they send you one back, it doesn’t have to be the same Bitcoin.
Blockchains can also store non-fungible tokens. These can store or point to information, are indivisible, have unique properties and aren’t interchangeable. Much of the utility in such non-fungible tokens derives from the ability to include metadata about an asset, such as historical ownership details that incontrovertibly show provenance.
NFT’s being indivisible, having unique properties and not being interchangeable can thus create scarcity of even the most common object such as a piece of open-source video art.
Knowledge and reproducibility — Beeple and Walter Benjamin
Beeple’s own words in the UpOnly with Cobie and Ledger Podcast about NFT’s are worth repeating.
My name is Mike Winkleman, Beeple, ahh, I make a bunch of weird digital art, that’s weird and I have been doing a picture everyday for the last second year, and I am actually quite new to this crypto, and I actually don’t know anyting this DiFi stuff like, it’s very scary to me, and seems, if I am being honest, the projects, the projects are your well; farming , shoving frigging pineapples up your butt…indistinct…liquidity mining… indistinct… there’s all this crazy shit. What the fuck are you guys doing (“Beeple and PplPleaser: The intersection of art and crypto” UpOnly with Cobie and Ledger Podcast, 19 February, 2021)
His words shine a hard light on NFT’s; their innate value and sometimes valuelessness, the imperfect market in which they exist, a market of specialised information. His word’s succinctly and powerfully confirm an artist need not fully understand NFT’s or even have faith in NFT’s — “… there’s all this crazy shit. What the fuck are you guys doing.”
He touched on DiFi a signpost that throughout the same podcast there was an interchangeability of NFT’s as art or tradeable commodities.
Taken together the need to know and understand highly specialised information and the high prices create a high barrier to entry for any collector. Thus it is likely that the Pareto Principle applies that is only a small pool of collectors —successful crypto participants— drive the market.
This is confirmed by research reported in the New York Times, to quote:
“My maps show that the market for NFT-based art is extremely insular and tightly connected, even by the standards of the art world, especially among owners who buy and sell several times.” : The Art Market Often Works in Secret. Here’s a Look Inside. Albert-Laszlo Barabasi Dr. Barabasi is a professor of network science at Northeastern University and at Central European University.
The path forward is backwards
NFT’s can perfectly create scarcity of both the work and collectors, which is the structure of the existing and traditional art world structure, a high cost of entry, to become a “serious collector” a degree of knowledge and connoisseurship is required.
Walter Benjamin”, the philosopher and cultural critic, wrote 85 years ago, his seminal essay “The Work of Art in its Age Technological Reproducibility” His ideas are — to him unknowingly prescient — signposts of the destination digital art and NFT’s will inexorably travel to and have already travelled.
He argues the unique work of art — the photograph, the painting, the cathedral — existed, and that the reproduction is independent of the original and “can place the original in situations which itself cannot attain” — I can hang a poster of the Mona Lisa on my bedroom wall. The “here and now” of the artwork is the same for every copy.
For Benjamin the reproducibility devalued the “here and now” the core of the artwork but for digital works reproducibility is part of their “here and now”, their core — That core is its authenticity” (Benjamin 1935)
For him these aspects are focussed in the concept of the aura of the work of art. There is no better description of aura that his poetic words;
What, then, is the aura? A strange tissue of space and time: the unique apparition of a distance, however near it may be. To follow with the eye-while resting on a summer afternoon-a mountain range on the horizon or a branch that casts its shadow on the beholder is to breathe the aura of those mountains, of that branch. (Benjamin 1935)
Digital art is different, there is no scarcity, no version is any different to any other, there is no degradation of experience no loss of the “authority of the object”. Every copy is identical, and as there is no original there is no “specific place”, every version, every place in every time is valid — the digital Mona Lisa on my bedroom wall is as much an original as the digital work in the Louvre.
Every work is as authentic as every other copy – that is its core, its authenticity, its aura. It is democratic available to all, as valid to you as to me.
Benjamin describes a cultural structure; unique works of art, authentic with an “aura” which is degraded by reproduction, works in a specific time and place and thus scarce.
He has described the aspect NFT’s have added to the artwork. There is now an original, it exists with a unique digital blockchain signature, it is authentic, it now has an aura none of which exists in any copy. Perhaps I could display a copy of digital work in my home but it is a degraded copy of the original in a place the original cannot attain.
There is a degradation of the democratic nature of the digital artwork with the advent of NFT’s, and to me this is a regret but NFT’s with this cost bring benefits both to artists and the audience of these works.
Kevin Roose: Why Did Someone Pay $560,000 for a Picture of My Column? NY Times March 26, 2021
Beeple: Everyday Joe-Joe 7-Apr-20
Where to next?
Much of the excitement and press coverage generated by the sale of the NFT “Everyday” has been cynical; the “I can do that” NY Times article — I add he did — negative, questioning the inherent value of the NFT’s, in effect their Aura, prophetic, prices will crash, it is a bubble and it is not really art.
To me the sale of Everyday highlighted two important positives that NFT’s are bringing to the digital artwork; more participants in the NFT art market an NFT gives an artist more agency in their work.
As I have stated above it was not transacted in the crypto marketplace. It is true the buyer was not a crypto neophyte but an industry participant. Nonetheless buyers totally ignorant of NFT’s, the technicalities of crypto could enter the market and purchase the work.
Advisors, galleries, mainstream criticism will follow as sure as night follows day. As these participants enter less specialised, less knowledgeable buyers can enter. As more buyers enter more artists can enter too which will inevitably provide opportunities for lower priced works to be offered and sold.
So within a very short time the traditional art market / infrastructure will incorporate the sale of NFT art works bringing new buyers and participants. Whether the majority of sales will move to this channel is impossible to know, but it is simply easier for a collector who is new to crypto, who as Beeple says… I am actually quite new to this crypto stuff…”
NFT’s are already moving beyond the digital to the physical particularly in the fashion world, and interestingly moving away from its link to economic value. LVMH, and Richemont formed the non-profit Aura Blockchain Consortium (https://auraluxuryblockchain.com) which uses blockchain technology for product identification and traceability (see
“The state-of-the-art = technology of Aura Blockchain matches a product ID to a client ID, providing the infrastructure – through a chain of secure, non-reproducible, digital blocks – to enable consumers to access the history of a product and proof of its authenticity at every step of the value chain” https://www.lvmh.com/news-documents/news/lvmh-partners-with-other-major-luxury-companies-on-aura-the-first-global-luxury-blockchain/ \
The sale marks the beginning of the end of the dislocation of mechanism / technology of economic transfer and provenance and an artist’s agency.
Once a work left an artist’s studio its ownership history, selling price, movements would become opaque to the artist. Rarely would an artist share in proceeds of secondary market sales or have any input as to where the work would go.
NFT’s are a unique digital record of authenticity sitting behind the work previously achieved primarily by physical marks; for example an artist’s signature, a printers mark. A signature, a printer’s mark contains little information, an NFT should be complete. These were imperfect open to forgery, hidden from the artist and collectors — the ultimate degradation of an artwork.
The work’s provenance is complete and to all intents and purposes perfect — date of creation of the work as an NFT, it’s economic transfer history, ownership and creator of the NFT — which need not necessarily be the artist.
NFT’s give the artist ongoing agency in the work if so desired. The NFT can include include conditions which provide a royalty stream to the artist / creator, or equally restrictions on sale.
To me most importantly the artist now has agency, if they so desire, to imbue a work with Benjamin’s “here and now”, authenticity, aura either as one work or as a work to be perfectly reproduced and exist wherever.
