It may seem like a lot for a digital-only artwork. But in some ways, NFTs are a continuation of collecting as usual
O n 11 March, one of the art world’s signature can-you-believe-it moments made global headlines: a digital-only artwork sold for more than $69m, the third highest price ever paid for an artwork at auction. It was a digital collage by the artist Mike Winkelmann, known as Beeple, who until October had never sold a print for more than $100.
This sensational auction came on the heels of simmering interest in “non-fungible tokens”, or NFTs, which finally boiled over into the annals of art auction houses. NFTs are unique assets verified by blockchain technology; as with cryptocurrency, a record of who owns what is stored on a decentralised public ledger of sorts. Thus NFTs function like a digital certificate of authenticity that can be attached to all manner of things, virtual or physical. Mostly now, they are being used to monetise digital assets such as audio files, videos, Gifs, tweets and even virtual versions of sneakers; 621 of them recently sold for a combined $3.1m.
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It’s worth noting: buying an NFT does not necessarily mean you are buying the copyright to something, or even the only digital copy; many NFTs are minted for videos or images that are easily accessible elsewhere on the internet. (Even images of Beeple’s record-smashing work are visible all over the web.) But an NFT confers a particular kind of ownership rights – it’s like purchasing not a particular thing, but your ownership of that thing.
The NFT-meets-art-world craze is the latest in a series of blockchain-backed experiments around the authentication of property and digital art on the internet. NFTs are a way for artists working in new technologies to make money in a space that has been historically difficult to monetise. Viewed less generously, the whole ordeal is a fad for the rich, who are speculating with crypto on things no one needs or perhaps even really wants, possibly as a way to quickly flip the assets for more crypto. Or, as Jacob Silverman put it in the New Republic: “[NFTs] are title deeds for increasingly useless crap.”
The NFT craze strikes me as fascinating mostly as a continuation, in a new form, of the strange practice of collecting in general. The collector is fetishised in the art world – and in literature about art – as a disciplined figure with a keen eye who can spot beautiful things before anyone else, someone who is at once a connoisseur and a kind of entrepreneur. The collector’s impulses drive many of the mechanics of what we think of as “the art world”: auctions and sales, fairs and biennales, loans and donations to museums. Indeed, much of the world’s art is in private collections, though we have no idea how much, nor any way to begin to tally it up. Collectors accumulate their troves of paintings and sculpture and photographs for all kinds of reasons – love of art, love of the game of collecting, love of money. (Art is often spoken of as a good investment, one that always appreciates.) And perhaps the most crucial aspect of collecting is possession: the sense that you are buying something that is yours and yours alone.
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The concept of ownership has become so embedded in our conception of artwork that the idea of digital “collecting” has long been vexed. Is a digital collection just a series of image files online, pixelated? Couldn’t someone easily “steal” your Jpeg just downloading a copy elsewhere? Is there any point, if you can’t show your prized painting off on your physical wall? NFTs hardly answer all of these questions, but they manage to provide a clear enough articulation of digital ownership to spark the interest of curious collectors and speculators. This new concept of digital possession, however murky it may actually be, is worth quite a lot of money.
Thus the collector’s impulse has finally found its way to the virtual realm, now that the point is less the virtual objects themselves and more the ownership of them. Some people are buying for the crypto gains, and some for the novelty, and maybe a few for the art itself. Artists will have a chance to experiment with new forms, and maybe even poke some fun at the absurd market dynamics. (It would hardly be first time: I am thinking of Yves Klein, the French artist and stunt master who sold documents certifying ownership of part of the Zone de Sensibilité Picturale Immatérielle, or empty space, in exchange for gold; then, if the buyer wished, they could burn the check and Klein would throw half the gold into the Seine.)
But in my view what’s interesting about the dynamics of NFTs in the art world are that, so far, they don’t represent much of a departure at all from big business as usual. NFTs allow the mechanics of the art world to turn once again back towards the collector’s impulse. More than the art or the object or the virtual thing, possession is the point.Non-fungible tokens are digital assets whose origin or ownership has been authenticated by blockchain technology, much like a digital "signature." Pictured: An NFT selling digital art. Screenshot via OpenSea.io
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A 10-second video created by digital artist Beeple recently sold for $6.6 million in an art auction. But what made this one video different from any number of copies or “forgeries” on the internet that are otherwise indistinguishable from the original?
The video itself is a “non-fungible token” or NFT, a digital asset whose origin or ownership has been authenticated by blockchain technology, much like a digital “signature.” One NFT cannot be exchanged for another NFT, which makes each one uniquely valued.
While this is making it easier to assign monetary values to digital art, critics like Blake Gopnik are afraid this will replicate a problem that’s been affecting the physical art sector for generations: valuing art for its authenticity but not for the art itself.
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“ Morning Report” host David Brancaccio spoke to Gopnik about the issues with authenticity in the digital art space. The following is an edited transcript of their conversation.
Blake Gopnik: No, it’s the way people have been thinking about art for about 500 years. We’ve all been completely obsessed with who makes a work of art and proving that it’s the real thing. You know, you want your Leonardo [da Vinci] to be by Leonardo, not to be by a follower, even if you love how it looks, when it’s by a follower. People who buy NFTs, or NFT-based art, just want to know that they’ve got the real version of the rainbow cat video that a million other people just have copies of. But, of course, they’re not copies, they’re exactly the same thing. So people are spending all this money just on these certificates, on these non-fungible tokens, that tell people that you’ve got the real thing. But the real thing isn’t real in any real way.
Brancaccio: I mean, one of the things here through my non-critic eyes is if you go see the “Mona Lisa” in the Louvre in Paris, you can see brushstrokes, so the original is different from seeing the copy in the art book. In the case of this authenticated video, there is no difference looking at the original or a copy.
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Gopnik: Yeah, it’s completely insane. But, again, that’s been happening for a long time in the art world, too. I mean, people produce prints, some of which they sign, and those are worth a fortune, and some of which they don’t sign, and those are worth much, much less or nothing at all. So the art world has always been weird about this. It’s always been trying to establish authenticity for objects that really aren’t that different from other objects. But this is just taking it to a new level where your video is absolutely the same as someone else’s.
Now normally in the art world, what you do is when you’ve got, say, a work of video art that you’ve got in a DVD, is you make sure that you don’t release it in a million copies. You just make five copies, and five collectors can own them, you know, for whatever, $100, 000 each. But in this case, people are buying these things because they’re already famous, because they already exist in thousands and thousands or millions of copies. So it’s a really weird reversal. If you’re buying the Nyan Cat, this cat that’s dragging a rainbow after it, you’re only buying it because it’s so famous already, because so many other people actually own it. So it’s a very weird, really absurd, kind of ownership.
Brancaccio: And here we are talking about the system of authenticating the work, but not the work itself. This 10-second video by Beeple.
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Gopnik: Yeah, video of a kind of putrescent corpse of Donald Trump lying on the ground. You know, no one in my world, no one in let’s call it the “serious
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