My NFT is Bigger than Yours
My NFT is Bigger than Yours

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My NFT is Bigger than Yours

The art world is being overrun by Non-Fungible What-Nows? In short, Non-Fungible Tokens (N.F.T.s) are a way of showing proof of ownership of a digital asset, of files such as art, audio, videos, or items in video games. An NFT exists on a blockchain, which serves as a public ledger to verify the asset’s authenticity. Unlike most digital items which can be endlessly reproduced, each NFT has a unique digital signature. Think: da Vinci’s Mona Lisa vs. prints of the Mona Lisa sold at the gift shop. An NFT certifies that you’ve got the former.

"In terms of auction prices, Beeple is now the third most valuable living artist, after David Hockney and Jeff Koons"

On March 11th, an artwork by digital artist Mike Winkelmann, known as Beeple, sold at famed auction house Christie’s for a record-setting $69 million. In terms of auction prices, this makes Beeple the third most valuable living artist, after David Hockney and Jeff Koons. Meanwhile, Kings of Leon are selling their new album as an NFT. The NBA is selling NFT basketball highlights. Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey’s first ever tweet sold as an NFT for $2.9 million on 21 March. According to market tracker NonFungible.com, the NFT market tripled in 2020, the total value of transactions increasing by 299% to $250m. Now, the same website notes some $240m spent on NFTs in March 2021 alone.

It should be mentioned that NFTs have come under scrutiny for their environmental impact: computational artist Memo Akten calculated that a single cryptoart NFT has a footprint of around 211kg of CO2 equivalent – the same amount as an EU resident’s electric power consumption for more than a month. While artist-led groups, such as Artnome, are already campaigning for more ecologically friendly NFTs, they seem unlikely to take off in the near future. Cryptocurrencies like Ethereum are decentralised, which, on the one hand, conjures images of the Occupy movement’s people’s microphone, a technique to make the voices of the ‘99%’ louder during protests; on the other hand, decentralisation attracts techno-libertarians whose policies of individualism and deregulation don’t tend to care too much about the abuse of natural resources.

"a single cryptoart NFT has a footprint of around 211kg of CO2 equivalent"

Freedom and community are, of course, both subjective terms. In the eye of this humble beholder, the current cryptoart boom and the new breed of virtual marketplaces, like Foundation, SuperRare and Zora, offer hope to many digital artists, who until now have relied on generating visits and engagement on platforms like Facebook and Instagram and getting almost nothing in return. Instead of relying on commissions, now digital artists have a way of making limited editions by ‘minting’ their work (putting it on Ethereum as an NFT), which offers a source of income and creates freedom to focus on their practice. Community-driven initiatives, such as Mint Fund, help cover the costs associated with tokenizing an artwork, and social networks like Clubhouse provide a space for crypto artists to support each other.

"Is Beeple’s historic sale at Christie’s is the art world equivalent of the shirtless, horn-hatted man storming the Capitol building?"

Yet, as in the world IRL, it’s not all Robin Hood and lovely art communes. A quick glance at the most expensive NFTs, the kind that make the news, leaves me feeling as cold as an old chest freezer filled with ancient Vienetta. Is Beeple’s historic sale at Christie’s the art world equivalent of the shirtless, horn-hatted man storming the Capitol building? As ever, the devil is in the details. And the NFT revolution so far seems to be being won by the Baddies.

"Money is a useful way of focusing human attention"

Of course, everyone enjoys the frisson of a good shake-up. Money is a useful way of focusing human attention -- that's what the Global Art Museum believe anyhow. 'We are disrupting the art museum industry by transforming old paintings and artwork into NFT's wrote Global Art Museum on Twitter. 'The NFT space is new and nebulous, but we aim to bring the museums into this space. The days of boring staid and stuffy museums are over.' After effectively art heisting works from open source images provided by public galleries and tokenising them, the museum posted a GIF saying ‘you have been punked’. Apparently, they weren’t heisting at all? But trying to start a conversation? It was all a bit confusing?

"While revealing that the art market is a weird cult that comes complete with its own ridiculously expensive relics, are all cults as bad as each other?"

While financial libertarianism is being praised, the aesthetics of the highest valued crypto art are all too reminiscent of another kind of paranoid libertarianism brought about by the internet. They remind me of David Dees’ conspiracy theory art works, as visually grotesque as they were flagrantly anti-Semitic (and anti- most other people, too). Looking at the top selling NFTs so far, and the aesthetic they share could be termed ‘4chan’. Simpsons overlords, Joe Biden as a giant pig being suckled. Skeletons with their flesh burned off, naked Trump straddling the Whitehouse, captioned ‘End Game’. The corner of the internet where NFTers spring from can be a dark place.

Don't @ me. I am not charging Beeple with anti-semitism (though the work’s sexist and racist undertones have been called out elsewhere; as Ben Davis puts it so brilliantly for ArtNet: ‘We’ve passed through a racial uprising and a reckoning with sexism, and the cultural project of the moment is… innovating new ways to worship decade-old, BroBible-level brain farts?’) It's just that memeified news clippings, collaged in as they are, eventually go beyond the realms of nihilistic humour and begin to signify something far heavier. There are only so many times you can see Mickey Mouse slash a burger slash laser beams burst through someone’s skull (again, again, and again), before all this excess ends up looking like reverence for irreverence itself. Ideologically, there’s an empty ouroboros logic to all this – like someone defending ‘free speech’, when actually defending free speech is all they really have to say. Sometimes, it’s more discerning to keep schtum.

"don't chop a head off, unless you have something to put there instead"

While financial libertarianism proves a big disruptor to the stuffy, gellid pockets of the world's richest people and their dusty art collections, everything has a context. Who pays the price? While revealing that the art market is a weird cult that comes complete with its own ridiculously expensive relics, are all cults as bad as each other? Are some markets more virtuous others, or are we replacing like with like – maybe worse?

I smell a Greek-myth style reckoning: don't chop a head off, unless you have something to put there instead. Otherwise, ten more heads appear in its place, turning the world to stone and then rubble (I’m imagining a kind of Medusa-Hyrda hybrid). I hope that those digital artworks which deserve it are able to jump on the movement’s coattails before its prophesied end – but, if NFTs are going to remain a site for internet bros to swing their dicks around in, I hope the bubble bursts faster than GameStop’s.

By Sammi Gale

Banner Image: Thawing, diptych by Kristoffer Zetterstrand

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