All that is solid melts in the Ethereum: the brave new (art) world of NFTs

ABSTRACT

This article explores non-fungible tokens, better known as NFTs, or blockchain-based certificates of ownership for visual or physical assets, a cultural phenomenon which has come to the media attention following the sale of a non-fungible token photo collage, Everyday: The First 5,000 Days, for more than 69 million USD at a Christie's auction in March 2021. The sale made Mike Winkelman (aka Beeple) the third most valuable living artist, behind Jeff Koons and David Hockney starting off a conversation about NFTs which has covered a wide range of issues, including: the contested relationship between art and the market, the long debated question of collective and/or individual authorship within digital aesthetics, the most recent developments in Artificial Intelligence and their creative potential with regard to NFTs – i.e. the appearance of intelligent non-fungible tokens (iNFTs) – and, lastly, the role of cryptocurrencies as a tool for artists’ empowerment or, conversely, as a selling out, under new technological guises, to the capitalist logic of the market. The article reviews and evaluates such debates with the aim to offer critical pointers to help the reader navigate the emerging world of Crypto art.

KEYWORDS:

• NFTs
• Crypto art
• blockchain
• contemporary art
• digital art
• AI art

I found out too late that NFT does not

stand for Nudist Fishing Trip

Trevor Noah (comedian)

@chelseathepope (actor and comedian)

Introduction

Cryptocurrencies (digital or virtual currencies built on blockchain technology) are currently under the spotlight, however secrecy is embedded in the very etymology of the word ‘crypto’ – from the Greek kruptos = hidden. Unsurprisingly cryptography and cryptocurrencies share the same etymological root although ‘there remains an internecine feud among the tech savvy about the word’ (Cantor 2021). The reason is that while cryptography (the encoding and decoding of information) has been around for millennia, cryptocurrency is a relatively new development which, in the words of one cryptographer, as ‘a concept … may or may not survive government regulation’ (Cantor 2021).

Cryptocurrencies, like any other type of digital technology, do not exist in a political and societal vacuum even though theirs is a strenuous attempt to remove the prone to bias ‘human factor’ from any financial transaction in order to privilege ‘neutral’ technology. As Brekke and Haase accurately point out, ‘Blockchain technology is seen by many as a way to replace social contracts with ‘smart’ automation. So the blockchain community is driven by a deep mistrust of social contracts’, however, they crucially add, ‘They forget that most events in the world are indeed ambiguous and complex requiring interpretation and mediation’ (in Catlow et al. 2017, 93).

I shall be addressing the contradictions of using crypto know-how within a capitalist framework, as they are perceived by some artists below, in the meantime it is useful to clarify that NFTs (acronym for non-fungible tokens), on which this article will focus, are digital assets based on blockchain, which in turn can be described as a chain of blocks containing information difficult (some say impossible) to break, it is essentially a digital ledger of transactions duplicated and distributed on the blockchain network.¹ As I write this article it is a time of important anniversaries in the world of cryptocurrencies, October 13th 2021 marked the 30th anniversary of the public appearance of the ‘genesis block’, the world’s oldest continuously running primitive blockchain and January 3rd 2022 represents the 13th anniversary of the Bitcoin genesis block. Bitcoin’s design was originally described in Satoshi Nakamoto’s whitepaper ‘Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System’.² Predictably, such anniversaries are going to be celebrated with a collection of NFTs (ChainWire 2021), after all this is a technology very much aware of its own collectability value, and one which firmly believes the myth of its own endurance.³ In the hubris-inspired words of digital artist Krista Kim, creator of the NFT Mars House, a digital file which sold for $512,000,

I call NFTs the supreme art medium because all of your ideas and your creative energy are carried into infinity. So even after the human race is gone and there’s an alien race, they will have a record of what we have done here today. There’s no one that’s going to intercept it or block it; it’s not going to get burned. No one can destroy our ideas; it will be out there, and it’s decentralized. Even when the human race is extinct, the footprint of who we were as human beings will always exist (Schneier 2021).

Most NFTs are traded on the Ethereum blockchain, Ethereum is a cryptocurrency like Bitcoin, only differently from Bitcoin each token in any NFT is non-fungible, this means that it is unique and, crucially, can accrue value. It is this non-fungible quality which has made NFTs so successful in selling art and in trading any type of virtual object. Anything stored on a blockchain as data can be sold as an NFT and anything can potentially become a ‘collectible’, in fact NFTs have been declared the Beanie Babies of the 2020s – the Beanie Babies stuffed toys popular in the 1990s were one of the first internet (Web 1.0) collectables (Nieu 2021). Only by 2004 the Beanie Babies toys craze had all but collapsed. For Nieu there are striking similarities between NFTs and Beanie Babies, particularly if one considers the extraordinary prices paid for Crypto Punks, a series of 10,000 computer generated images of ‘punks’ (pixel portraits of an individual featuring random attributes like a pipe, a hat, sunglasses), initially created as an art project in 2017. They were released for free but then, Nieu explains, ‘A secondary market appeared, where people started trading them for ETH’. And by the Saturday after release, one Punk traded for 10ETH ($3,500 at that time)’.⁴ These days such images sell for much more, in March 2021 punk #3100 sold for $7.58m (Nieu 2021). Another example of successful NFTs is Bored Apes, an important innovation, according to Nieu, was that by buying an Ape one would become part of the Bored Ape Yacht Club and acquire certain benefits – belonging to a community is highly treasured in the world of NFTs, for example ‘when a buyer makes his Twitter avatar an image from a new N.F.T. club, it’s a sign of allegiance, and also a signal to other buyers in the club to follow him on social media’ (Chayka 2021), and a great boost for the brand!

For Nieu NFTs’ popularity comes down to four factors ‘Novelty … Scarcity … Hype … Accessible distribution … ’, and at the core of the NFT craze are ‘rich people flexing, internet celebs shilling, regular people trying to make a quick buck trading’ (Nieu 2021). Contrary to Beanies, where the supply of toys was controlled by the manufactures, in the case of NFTs there are a multitude of creators so it is exactly this ‘scale of the movement’, that explains why ‘the NFT fad might come in waves and last longer than the Beanie one’ (Nieu 2021). Nieu is not off the mark, especially when he states that, while Beanies were physical objects one could own, ‘the real value of NFTs could lie in the fact that you can just indefinitely generate new ones and treat them as disposable, yet immutable’ (Nieu 2021). ‘Scarcity’, listed among the reasons for popularity, assumes a significant connotation when it comes to NFTs, one which is key to their success, in fact the cryptocurrencies used to trade them are themselves based on an economics of scarcity ‘a credibly maintained limitation, imposed through software, of digital information, goods or services that may be accessed and used entirely digitally’(Brekke and Fischer 2021, 6). The obvious motivation for engineering such digital scarcity is to ‘support business models that profit from scarcity or uniqueness in the digital realm’ (Brekke and Fischer 2021, 7. Italics mine).

Web 3.0 uniqueness comes at a premium, even in the most unlikely quarters, Twitter founder Jack Dorsey minted in March 2021 his first Tweet as an NFT and sold it for 2.9 million USD⁵, this apparently inspired Jimmy Wales, founder of the Wikipedia project, to auction an NFT of ‘Hello World!’, the first words published on a Wikipedia page on January 15th, 2001. Interestingly, the NFT is not a static JPEG but an interactive experience, the buyer can edit that very first page however they want because, as Wales puts it, ‘The artistic concept of this piece is to experience what I experienced that morning’ (https://opensea.io/collection/editthisnft). Also, in June 2021 Tim Berners-Lee sold a piece of web history as an NFT. The code for the web has long been in the public domain, what the winner of the NFT auction bought was a collector’s package NFT: ‘time-stamped files of the visual source code as well as a digital letter from Berners-Lee, an animation of the original code, and a digital ‘poster’ that includes a representation of Berners-Lee’s signature’ (Heilweil 2021). Berners-Lee’s view of NFTs is very positive, in his words they are ‘the latest playful creations in this realm, and the most appropriate means of ownership that exists’ (in Heilweil 2021). Such an endorsement is significant because, ‘the father of the Web … is lending some of his own credibility to the still-nascent technology – and the idea that it could become more than a fad’ (Heilweil 2021).⁶

Celebrities like Kate Moss can earn $17,000 without having to leave their bed, literally, by selling a pre-recorded video, Sleep with Kate as an NFT (https://foundation.app/@mitnft/~/21291), and there is even a dedicated celebrity digital auction house, Cryptograph, whose enticing motto reads: ‘Made by Icons, Owned by You, One-of-a-kind digital collectibles from your favourite icons and artists that raise money for charity forever, all secured by blockchain technology’ (https://www.cryptograph.com/). A former US First Lady has started her own NFT platform, on December 19th, 2021 Melania Trump announced (ironically) on Twitter the launch of her NFT titled Melania's Vision. As the dedicated page reads: ‘Marc-Antoine Coulson’s breathtaking watercolor embodies Melania Trump’s cobalt blue eyes, providing the collector with an amulet to inspire’. (https://melaniatrump.com/eyes-nft). The NFT also includes an audio recording with this motivational message by Mrs Trump: ‘My vision is: look forward with inspiration, strength and courage’. The NFT is sold for one SOL (approximately $180 – supply in January 2022 was of 2827), SOL is a cryptocurrency that runs on the Solana blockchain (a competitor of Ethereum). An undisclosed ‘portion’ of the proceeds from the NFT sales is destined to a children’s charity. Controversially, Parler, the alternative to Twitter social media platform favourite by right-wing conservatives, claimed that they had assisted in the buildout of the NFT platform for Mrs Trump, and it is interesting to speculate whether the world of politics will enter the one of NFTs in the future.

Sports personalities have also sold NFTs, the NFT ‘Moment’ Andy Murray’s Wimbledon 2013 Victory, was limited to an edition of 20 and sold with two Centre Court tickets to a Wimbledon 2022 game … as well as a Physical Artifact of the Moment, and a signed Wimbledon 2021 poster (https://tinyurl.com/2afnt4b6). What is for sale in this case, as in the one of the Wikipedia first page above, is that special ‘Moment’ in history, a real-world event not tied to art, which potentially attracts the ‘average consumer’. One of the most interesting examples of ‘Moments’ for sale as NFTs is Vault by CNN (vault being the news organization’s crypt where all the stories told are collected). Moments like a presidential victory, billionaires in space or, in a self-referential loop, the ‘NFT boom’ are, as the Vault by CNN page reads, ‘Moments that changed us’, and that we can ‘own and experience’, or perhaps re-experience if we were around when the stories were first told. What matters most is that such stories are now ours to own forever. As Fischer Wright (2021) cogently observes, ‘there is something interesting about the way these Moments connect notions of authenticity, nostalgia, and private property’, in fact it is exactly this powerful nexus of factors which explains the soaring ‘collectability value’ and has led some to compare the NFTs mania to the seventeen-century tulip mania (Shang-Jin Wei 2021), a financial bubble bound to burst. Cryptocurrencies have no intrinsic fundamental value and are therefore vulnerable to price crashes, with the added problem that they have a huge ecological cost due to the fact that blockchain technology requires users to expend a lot of energy to mine and trade tokens (proof-of-work model).⁷ The environmental impact of NFTs is highly controversial, fortunately Flash Art has dedicated a full issue to this crucial topic and canvassed the opinions of a group of specialist artists, activists, and theorists (Memo Akten, Jason Bailey, Alice Bucknell, Chloe Diamond, Primavera De Filippi, Fanny Lakoubay, Geert Lovink, Casey REAS). Their contributions are presented as ‘a hybrid manifesto whose internal conflicts reflect the present struggle toward a new ecology of crypto art’ (Estorick and Jochim 2021).

What is important to emphasize is that buying NFTs is not like buying the object per se, what the buyer owns is just a digital certificate of ownership. Consequently, as Jonty Wareing has pointed out in a Twitter thread of March 17th^, 2021, the technology that supports many NFTs – including the one by Beeple sold for 69 million USD don’t actually reference the work itself but a web address or gateway that is maintained by the company that sold it. ‘If these companies disappear the NFTs won’t refer to anything’. Wareing’s conclusion is that ‘Right now NFT's are built on an absolute house of cards constructed by the people selling them. It is likely that _every_ NFT sold so far will be broken within a decade. Will that make them worthless? Hard to say’ (Wareing 2021). Also, the issue of copyright is not resolved yet, ‘legal experts are scrambling to determine how existing copyright laws will interact with this new technology, as some artists have had their work copied and sold as an NFT without their permission’ (Chow 2021).⁸ This was the case of Connor Bell and Sabby Life, whose plagiarized work was uploaded on an NFT marketplace and of artist, comic writer and novelist Liam ‘Sharpy’ Sharp who, in a Twitter thread of December 17th^, 2021, announced that he was shutting down his entire @DeviantArt gallery ‘as people were stealing his art and making NFTs of’.

Ironically, NFTs cannot even guarantee the one thing their value is supposedly predicated on, ownership of a unique digital asset, the architecture magazine Dezeen reported in March 2021 of a legal dispute between the artist (Krista Kim) and the 3D-modeller over the ownership of the above mentioned Mars House, the ‘first NFT digital house in the world’, a digital file that had sold for $512,000 (Ravenscroft 2021).

And yet the appeal for the crypto enthusiasts is that, when it comes to art in particular, the traditional gatekeepers of the market (critics, curators, gallerists) play no role in blockchain transactions, thus empowering the artist, or at least that is the idea Crypto art seems keen to project.

Cryptoart or Crypto art?

In January 2018 Jason Bailey published a post on his popular art and tech blog Artnome entitled ‘What is CryptoArt?’ where he declared that ‘art native to the blockchain has its own aesthetic and represents a new and important movement within art. I call this movement/aesthetic CryptoArt’ (Bailey 2018). Bailey coined the term as one word, perhaps to emphasize the binding connection between what he defines as ‘art’ and the blockchain, I prefer to use two words to underline the possibility that not all Crypto art is art. He went on to list a series of factors common to most Crypto art works and their aesthetic, it is worth quoting such list at length:

1. Digitally Native: For the first time, artwork can be created, editioned, bought, and sold digitally.

2. Geographically Agnostic: Empowered by the internet, artists participate from all over the world. CryptoArt is the first truly global art movement.

3. Democratic/Permissionless: Everyone is encouraged to participate regardless of skills, training, class, gender, race, age, creed, etc.

4. Decentralized: Tools and guidelines are designed to reduce the power of gatekeepers and middlemen and increase the autonomy of artists.

5. Anonymous: Use of pseudonyms allows artists to create and sell art while staying anonymous (if preferred), freeing them from social judgment.

6. Memetic: CryptoArt are often literally memes valued for their ability to spread quickly … 

7. Self-Referential: CryptoArtists often play with references to key events and personalities within cryptocurrency and blockchain culture.

8. CryptoPatrons: CryptoArt is collected by the CryptoRich: a group of savvy technologists and investors who got into cryptocurrency early.

9. Pro-Artist: Blockchain platforms often take little to no commission from artists. Artists are often remunerated for every future sale of a single work.

10. Dankness: Because CryptoArt is open to everyone, judging it by traditional artistic standards kills what is great about it. Instead, it is best to judge CryptoArt by ‘dankness’ or potency of expression and creativity (Bailey 2018, bold in the original).

This is a very useful enumeration of Crypto art attributes, however one might argue that not all are unique to the movement. For example, anonymity is not an exclusive prerogative of Crypto art (point 5) but of other artistic expressions as well, and while everyone is encouraged to participate (point 3) the NFTs market is dominated by white, young male artists in the Global North,⁹ also self-referentiality (point 7) is not exclusive to Crypto art and one fails to grasp the substantial difference between CryptoPatrons, CryptoRich (point 8) and the rich patrons which have traditionally collected fine art. As for point 9, blockchain fees, also called gas fees, they fluctuate from very little to a few hundred dollars, thus making it difficult for struggling artists to pay upfront in order to ‘mint’ their work (minting an NFT = creating an NFTs, that is uploading it to the blockchain). In fairness, projects like Mintfund (https://themint.fund/) can help artists with gas fees, work is listed on marketplace servers and fees are paid only when it is bought by a collector (this process is known as ‘lazy minting’). Lastly, (point 10), ‘dankness’, a term originating from meme culture and meaning cool, unique, seems the perfect escamotage to provide crypto creations with a free ‘art’ pass, thus one wonders whether art is always the most appropriate term to define creative works produced on the blockchain, more on crypto aesthetics later.

In his blog post Bailey also identifies two main categories of ‘CryptoArtists’, the Tech Savvy and the Self-trained, to the first category belong the creators of early NFTs like Crypto Kitties and Crypto Punks, as for the latter one, Baileys emphasises the empowering potential for artists to acquire new skills, a potential facilitated by creative technology platforms like Dada.nyc (Bailey 2018).

Two years after Bailey’s influential post (a long time in the NFTs world!), Beatriz Helena Ramos, a professionally trained artist and one of the founders of Dada.nyc published an article provocatively entitled ‘The Complacency of Crypto Art’ (Ramos 2020). The article starts with the following quote by Judy Mam, cofounder of Dada.nyc, ‘Blockchain feels like it’s either the wild west or the Renaissance,’ which captures the deep seated (ideological) dichotomy at play in the Crypto art movement, renewal and change versus a speculative gold rush. For Ramos the movement should firmly be about the former, a position held since her keynote at the 2018 Ethereal Summit, where she emphatically warned: ‘We have an opportunity to not fuck it up this time’ (Ramos 2020). Only two years on and it looks like that opportunity has been squandered to the point that Ramos concedes, ‘Crypto art has become precisely what it claimed to disrupt: a crypto version of the conventional art market’. To prove her point she mentions the case of the Museum of Crypto Art (https://app.museumofcryptoart.com/collection) which had bought a transparent pixel for $15,000 from an artist with a large following on Twitter, this ‘may be exactly the kind of museum we deserve. But is it the kind of museum we intended?’ (Ramos 2020) – most recently, in April 2021, an NFT titled The Pixel by Pak and consisting of a single grey pixel was auctioned at Sotheby’s for $1.36 million.

Ramos is not interested in questions of aesthetics, or as she puts it, ‘whether pixels are good or bad art’, a point I would argue is still worthy of interest because ‘what is a stake in the debate over aesthetics is that … without a frame of reference on which all parties agree, those who control the market will invariably determine what constitutes crypto art itself, and therefore who gets excluded’ (Estorick, Waters, and Diamond 2021). What Ramos cares about are the artists, so in writing her article she was hoping to help ‘reframe the conversation away from an expensive pixel to how we can really do things differently than the art market’ (Ramos 2020). From her perspective what is killing the ‘greatness’ of Crypto art is not, to quote Bailey, ‘judging it by traditional artistic standards’, but Crypto art’s own business model.

Ramos is not the only artist/creative technologist who is critical of crypto culture, in an interview with Evgeny Morozov, chief curator of the crypto syllabus (https://the-crypto-syllabus.com/background/), a set of resources launched in December 2021 with the aim ‘to enrich the global critical conversation about all things crypto’, artist Geraldine Juárez stated in no uncertain terms: ‘crypto is decidedly a right wing conservative project and part of this process of recuperation required for capital to continuously transform and expand. This too is always an aesthetic process, and is why the critique of the political aesthetics of the blockchain is essential’ (Morozov 2021a). Juárez’s words bring to mind Benjamin’s famous thesis that ‘the logical result of fascism is the introduction of aesthetics into political life’ (Benjamin 1936) – in Nazi Germany or Fascist Italy culture entertained the individual with the illusion that certain spaces were beyond politics. Crypto-capitalism provides the artist, art collector, cryptocurrency investor with the utopian dream of the ‘Big Sale’ or the ‘quick buck’ thanks to a technology, the blockchain, located ‘outside’ society and politics. It is as if the price to pay for individual financial emancipation were the loss of any form of social contract (to be replaced by the blockchain equivalent of ‘smart contracts’).¹⁰ Also Juárez observes that ‘the idea that decentralization of infrastructure [a cornerstone of the blockchain system] equals decentralization of power is a trap’,¹¹ by positing ‘decentralization’ as ‘the new democratization’ a dangerous ideological ambiguity is set in place, the values of the left and the right overlap until any distinctiveness is lost. In conclusion, NFTs are:

contracts being used to deploy the category of art to extract private property, turning art things into digital assets that can be loaded into a vending machine. This frictionless machine only dispenses art as a ghost, a form that – like all exchange value – is magical and mysterious but should not be confused with aura, simply because there is no such thing as an authentic digital copy. It is not the ghost in the vending machine either. It is the ghost of property, a fictitious experience of ownership glancing back at us through our screens. Capitalised aura, perhaps (Juárez 2021).

The capitalised aura is, for Juárez, evidence that capital corrupts a potentially revolutionary technology. Keeping up the Benjamin inspired critique, in an article entitled ‘The Work of Art in the Age of the Non-Fungible Token’, philosopher Tom Whyman suggests that,

what NFTs might seem to be heralding is a highly un-Benjaminian technological development: one which allows us to restore aura, to revive lost notions of authenticity. Indeed: as a form of blockchain technology, NFTs literally do what Benjamin claimed unique, non-reproducible art objects used to: provide a log of the history of the exchanges to which the work has been subjected. (Whyman 2021)

All would lead us to believe that the aura is back, however, ‘The tokens might be non-fungible: but the art (or similar) that any given NFT is associated with remains just as reproducible as it was before … on the blockchain, art is stripped of all its old value: all that was once sacred melted down into crypto’ (Whyman 2021). Perhaps, he speculates, ‘NFTs could be considered to involve something like what Benjamin calls ritual value – even if this is not something they are restoring to the art itself’, before concluding,

The best Benjaminian reading of NFTs is simply to say: they help to place art in the service of this new religion … crypto would still be a bad thing, even if its environmental impact could be mitigated – scarcity is not something any free society should be aiming to produce. NFTs might not make art as such more distant from us – but they do help make the world we live in even more alien; harder for us ordinary non-tech billionaires to act in, or to understand (Whyman 2021).

Or perhaps, as Gopnik (2021) writes, ‘the NFT craze encapsulates the absurdity of the art world – and its obsession with authenticity’, and so he ponders, ‘the purveyors of NFT art are actually working … as conceptual artists drawing attention to the absurdity of authenticity and exclusivity in the digital domain. Does it matter that they don’t know it?’ (Gopnik 2021).

The answer to Gopnik’s question is that it would matter if they cared to know, in fact the purveyors of NFT art might learn from the cautionary tale of conceptual artists before them who, for all their criticism of the bureaucracies of capitalism, ‘failed to subvert the system against which they sought to position themselves’ (Zeilinger in Catlow et al. 2017, 294).

The age of the Flatulent Aura

Adorno might have had a point when he thought that mechanical reproduction didn't necessarily dispel the aura, and ‘that technology would enable the growth of an aura around artwork, leading art to be more commodified. The more reproduced the work, the more desirable and valued the original became’ (Geczy 2021). Thus, it happens that in January 2022, 61 years after Piero Manzoni produced 90 cans of Artist's shit, one finds NFTs for the audio recording of fart noises auctioned on the blockchain (for 0.05 ETH = 188.31$). The project, apparently inspired by Covid19 ‘boredom creativity’, is described as:

On March 12, 2020, as the nation entered what would prove to be an indeterminate period of quarantine, 5 individuals began and continued to collectively record their farts. Exactly one year later, this piece represents that unabridged document. Below, find a 20-minute excerpt containing many dozens of unique farts. Upon purchase buyer will be delivered full 52 minute audio file (https://flatulence.space/).

The NFTs farts produced by Brooklyn-based film maker Alex Ramírez-Mallis and friends might echo Manzoni’s series of balloons sold as Artist’s Breath (1960) – a work perhaps influenced by Duchamp’s readymade ampoule – however they do lack their subversiveness and, most importantly their anti-art critique, they are lads’ pranks for sale on the blockchain. Fortunately, Manzoni’s artistic legacy has not gone up in the ‘ether’ entirely, Cassils – a Guggenheim Award-winning, transgender, Canadian–American performance artist (https://www.cassils.net/) – produced in July 2021 an NFT art project called $HT Coin that is ‘a complex questioning of how art engages with consumption, and particularly NFTs’ (Silva 2021).

The project was launched anonymously as ‘White Male Artist’ and comprised of a performative and a visual element. The performative element included Cassils eating a series of meals based on the diets of financially successful white male artists. They then pooped into tin cans and put those cans on display at 432 Park Avenue (Silva 2021). The cans were auctioned on the Ethereum blockchain over 24 hours, and each had a digital companion in the form of NFTs. In the interview with Silva (2021) Cassils admits that they were initially intrigued by the emancipatory potential of the new blockchain technology, however enthusiasm soon turned into disillusionment, as they explain,

So often we think of value being linked to merit, but we of course all know that there's not necessarily the same … .And I was hearing a lot of utopic technical discourse around the possibility of NFTs being this anti-hierarchical, horizontal platform, when, in fact, what we were seeing … with … Beeple’s $69million sale from my perspective as an artist who rigorously works on both formal and conceptual and poetics, I found that to be a really banal piece. And so, although we have this promise of this new open-ended platform that makes space for everybody, again, we see it instantly being occupied by white male mediocrity and greed and speculation driven by market forces (Silva 2021).

For Cassils the ‘notion that 98 percent of successful artists in this world today, are cis men … begs the question, who are the remaining 2 percent? Are they just women? … what about the rest of us? Where is the room for that kind of inclusion?’ (Silva 2021). More on inclusivity and NFTs below.

If one posits, as art historian David Joselit (2021) did, that while ‘Duchamp used the category of art to liberate materiality from commodifiable form; the NFT deploys the category of art to extract private property from freely available information’, then it follows that NFTs are the end result of a process of assetization typical of technoscientific capitalism, this is exactly the process described by Kean Birch and Fabian Muniesa (2020).¹²

Artist Brian Eno, an early adopter of new technologies in his artistic practice, is also critical of NFTs, in a conversation with Morozov he reveals to be ‘not sure what is being brought into the world that makes any difference to anything other than some strings of numbers moving about in some bank accounts. I want to know what is changing, what is being made different, what is helping, what is moving? I don’t see any answers to that question’ (Morozov 2021b). NFTs seem to him ‘just a way for artists to get a little piece of the action from global capitalism, our own cute little version of financialisation. How sweet – now artists can become little capitalist assholes as well’ (Morozov 2021b).¹³

Canadian concept artist Kimberly Parker would probably agree with Eno’s colourful definition, for her NFT sites like Ethereum are victim factories, and the victims are not just the investors but the artists themselves, since ‘This feudalist system quickly turns artists into crypto recruiters, desperate to bring even more people into the fold so the value of their Ethereum token stays high and they can sell for a profit … ’ (Parker 2021).

Her conclusions, having examined marketplace data for NFT sales, are damning:

These numbers do not show the democratization of wealth thanks to a technological revolution. They show an acutely minuscule number of artists making a vast amount of wealth off a small number of sales while the majority of artists are being sold a dream of immense profit that is horrifically exaggerated. Hiding this information is manipulative, predatory, and harmful, and these NFT sites have a responsibility to surface all this information transparently. Not a single one has (Parker 2021, bold in original).

The democratization of wealth might not be entirely successful as Parker puts it, however it is undeniable that NFTs have changed many content creators’ lives. Filipino graphic designer AJ Dimarucot (https://ajdimarucot.com/) (Figure 1), for example, announced on Twitter the sale of his Nike-inspired riff of René Magritte’s painting, The Treachery of Images, for the equivalent of $7,200, a very decent return in the context of income standards in the Philippines. Ironically the ‘treachery of images’ might be an excellent metaphorical description of the NFTs ecosystem!

Figure 1. AI Dimarucot Sw005h #01.

For some, like @AdamantiumNFT, participation in NFTs feels almost like leading a double life

Judging by the multitude of ‘likes’ to their tweet @Adamantium is not alone in experiencing the duality of crypto vs ‘normal life’. For others quitting the day job and living off ‘their creative vision’ is the ultimate source of excitement,

To echo the headline of a Washington Post article, ‘Crypto artists have been building a rebellious, underground community of outsiders for years. Now they’re making a living selling NFTs’ (Ables 2021). Ables quotes the example of the 47-year-old Scottish artist Anna Louise Simpson (https://www.annalouisesimpson.com/), who had struggled for years in the analogue art world before she started minting ‘obsessively’ her digital collages through a popular digital art marketplace called SuperRare. And then there is the case of Lethabo Huma (https://www.lethabohuma.com/), a 22-year-old artist from South Africa who, in a few months since learning about NFTs, ‘is bringing in enough money to pay her university fees and even help her mom with finances’, or Osinachi (https://cryptoart.io/artist/osinachi), an artist in Lagos, Nigeria, ‘who makes his pieces on Microsoft Word, was able to quit his job as a librarian in March 2020 and buy a house’ (Ables 2021). However, there is also an increasing awareness among the crypto enthusiasts that things are changing, ‘The influx of financial interests threatens what many crypto artists value most about their success: the freedom to forget about money and focus on art’, and even the Museum of Crypto Art (MoCA), in the words of its Director, acknowledges on its page ‘As new money enters this space, we will be tested, and I hope everyone can remain true to what attracted them here in the first place’ (https://tinyurl.com/29n3dt8y). Similarly, the co-founder of the Left Gallery (https://left.gallery/) admits that he ‘intentionally kept prices low so artists could collect each other’s work’, also he ‘is angered by the high amounts sellers are asking for crypto works post-Beeple’ and likens the bidding landscape to rich kids in Lamborghinis driving on the highway to see who goes the fastest’ (Ables 2021).

Even Holly Herndon, one of the most interesting multidisciplinary artists working with NFTs, and supportive of their capacity to actualize the democratic and creative potential of artists in the Web 3.0, acknowledged during a panel discussion at the latest Art Basel Fair (October 2021) that NFTs are passed around by day traders and function as their own currency. However, she remains positive about NFTs’ ‘weird culture’ which, in her view, is more inclusive than the traditional art market one (Art Basel 2021). With regard to the key issue of inclusivity in the NFTs art world, in an interview for the BBC programme The Cultural Frontline in July 2021, Scottish art collector and co-founder of international collective Women of Crypto Art (WOCA) Etta Tottie and Senegalese artist Linda Rebeiz explain how they are working to make the world of NFT art more diverse. For Tottie there are serious barriers facing women working online, internet trolling being the most serious, however ‘if they wish to sell their art, they need to market their art through Twitter’. Unfortunately, Tottie admits, the aesthetic is overwhelmingly male (cyberpunk, female nudes), the crypto ‘whales’ are men who have made a lot of money in crypto, they tend to be willing to spend a lot of money for male artists, thus reproducing the same inequalities present in the ‘real’ art world. Nevertheless, the fact that a woman artist can get international exposure of one’s work in a way that is cheaper, compared to what analogue Galleries would charge in commission fees, remains incentive enough for women to get involved and evidence, in Tottie’s opinion, of a ‘feminist potential’ for NFTs.

Tottie’s comment about the overwhelming ‘male aesthetic’ of NFTs confirms the point made earlier about the importance of aesthetics in connection to ‘who gets excluded’ (Estorick, Waters, and Diamond 2021). Estorick, Waters, and Diamond (2021) have the merit of addressing the question of aesthetics, ‘overlooked in the mainstream commentary about NFTs’, by grounding it in data, while acknowledging its ‘historical freight’. As they put it, ‘The search for an aesthetics of crypto art … requires investigating the standards by which crypto artists, as well as collectors, currently distinguish works of NFT Art as more than simply digital artifacts that have been tokenized. This is important because it acknowledges the existence of different skillsets’ (Estorick, Waters, and Diamond 2021).

For them, while useful, ‘aesthetics remains highly problematic, premised as it is on the ‘disinterested’ viewpoint of a supposedly neutral agent who is, in reality, the very definition of an elitist white male spectator. … Its problem is how to reconcile further environmental damage with the potential of NFTs to redeem a generation of digital creatives from lives of economic precarity’ (Estorick, Waters, and Diamond 2021).

From an optimistic perspective, which seems at odds with the threat posed by the ‘the deadly embrace between art and money’, they contend,

that it is exactly at the moment of art and money’s closest proximity that new forms of social practice might be forged. As crypto art increasingly cross-fertilizes with the critical strategies of contemporary art it has the chance to become a site for the critique of crypto-colonialism. Likewise, it will be in the contribution of new media artists, game engine designers and their kin that a new aesthetics will shape a new ethics of art’s production. (Estorick, Waters, and Diamond 2021, emphasis mine).

A possible strategy consists in ‘Isolating the specific qualities of NFT Art, its ‘medium-specificity’ to take a modernist trope, can be instructive in establishing its long-term trajectory as an art form, beyond simply a novel asset class’. (Estorick, Waters, and Diamond 2021). And they end with an important warning:

Endless variety should not be confused with cultural vitality; it merely entrenches a state of neoliberal numbness in which aesthetics and ethics remain permanently uncoupled. One of crypto art’s most important achievements so far has been to puncture the illusion of contemporary art as a space of ‘high’ culture. It must not fall victim to the same hubris (Estorick, Waters, and Diamond 2021).

The sale of Beeple’s (aka Mike Winkelmann) digital collage Everyday: The First 5,000 Days, for more than 69 million USD at a Christie's auction in March 2021 would seem to attest that the above warnings have not been heard. This event had striking similarities, in terms of media hype, with the sale, also at Christie’s in October 2018 for 432,500 USD of a portrait entitled Edmond de Belamy, a work created by an algorithm called Generative Adversarial Network (GAN). The source code used by the Paris based art collective Obvious (borrowed from AI researcher/artist Robbie Barrat) to create the ‘artwork’ triggered a debate as to the authenticity, authorship and ethics of using GAN to produce AI-art explored in (Notaro 2020). The fact that the sum paid for a ‘tokenised’ piece like Everyday is so exorbitant is evidence of the impact of crypto money on the art market and might explain, in light of new ways (3D, immersive) of imagining the Internet (metaverse), the creative potential of intelligent NFTs (iNFTs) as the result of GAN/A.I. art + Crypto art = iNFTS. More on such potential below.

The digital collage Everyday is a large, square image file (21,069 by 21,069 pixels) composed of images that Beeple released on the web, one a day, since May 1^st, 2007 and inspired by British artist Tom Judd (as Beeple acknowledged in a tweet of May 2nd, 2017). It was bought by the Singapore-based NFT production studio and crypto fund Metapurse which, in true crypto secretive stile, is financed by its pseudonymous founder Metakovan and operated by someone named Twobadour. In an interview following the sale Twobadour claimed that their interest in the work was ‘not because it’s digital and not because it’s an NFT, but because it represents compressed time and the only thing you can’t hack in this digital world is time. Skill is transferable and technology becomes obsolete. The only thing you can’t hack is time, and this piece represents 13 years of time. We believe that makes this an iconic, once-in-a-lifetime kind of piece’ (Kinsella 2021).

Unfortunately, as mentioned above (Wareing 2021), the durability of an NFT, even of a valuable one like Everyday, is far from being certain exactly because technology becomes obsolete! In the end Twobadour admits what was perhaps the real motivation behind the investment: ‘This is going to be a billion-dollar piece someday’ (Kinsella 2021).

But what about questions of aesthetics, is Everydays such a good piece of art to justify its auction prize? And, most importantly, has anyone bothered to look at all the thousands of images which make up this digital mosaic? Someone, artnet News National Art Critic Ben Davis, did by going through the thirteen year-images mosaic at Beeple’s web site (https://www.beeple-crap.com/everydays). What he discovered is that ‘there are four different Beeples at play in Everydays. None is likely to age well’ (Davis 2021). The four Beeples, in reverse chronological order, are the digital satirist, the sci-fi illustrator, the digital striver and, lastly, the Beeple who was just ‘playing around with cartoons’ (Davis 2021).

Davis is not impressed by Beeple’s skills as digital satirist, at one point he dismisses a particular cartoon because: ‘As political satire, it’s not exactly Daumier. I’m not sure it’s even South Park’, also he is not impressed by the quality of the rendering (for example in the case of Bernie Sanders depicted as a giant mother pig in a lab being milked). At best, several images about Black Lives Matter ‘come off as ghoulish’ and the ‘misogynistic treatment of Hillary Clinton … has been a consistent theme’ (Davis 2021). The misogynistic theme is also present in many images which reflect ‘late-2000s hipster irony-bro culture: cartoons, porno, and the intersection between cartoons and porno’ (Davis 2021). At the end of his journey through Everyday Davis sounds (understandably) downhearted: ‘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? During a time of immiseration, investors are competing to throw tens of millions of dollars … at this?’ (Davis 2021).

Unsurprisingly Everyday is presented under an altogether different light on Christie’s auction page (https://tinyurl.com/yzvvxb75). The piece is described as ‘monumental’, ‘a unique work in the history of digital art. This was also the first time that a major auction house accepted cryptocurrency, in this case Ether so ‘Acquiring Beeple’s work is a unique opportunity’, in the words of Noah Davis, specialist in Contemporary Art at Christie’s in New York, ‘to own an entry in the blockchain itself created by one of the world’s leading digital artists’. Davis is also keen to establish an artistic link between Beeple, the graphic designer working in 3D, and the forefather of conceptual art, ‘Beeple is looking at his whole body of work as it’s presented on Instagram as a kind of Duchampian readymade.¹⁴

A ‘kind of’ is sufficient to lend artistic credentials to a piece of work which has been deemed as overvalued even by Crypto art enthusiasts like Kenny Schachter, art dealer, artist, curator and critic and a fervent believer that ‘the advent of NFTs offers a revolutionary system which is shifting the balance of power back to the content creators’ (Schachter 2021).

Comparisons of sorts between NFTs and previous ‘revolutionary’ avant-garde movements – see references to Conceptualism above – are not uncommon, only to be expected for Futurism to feature among them as well.

A.I. + NFTs = iNFTs: It’s Alive, It’s Alive!

Kyle McDonald, (@kcimc), an artist working with code, was bursting with enthusiasm when in a Twitter thread of December 17th, 2021 asked: ‘WAS THE ENTIRE CRYPTO SCENE FORETOLD BY THIS ONE WEIRD ITALIAN FUTURIST ESSAY OVER ONE HUNDRED YEARS AGO??’ (block capital letters in original). The essay is ‘Weights, Measures, and Prices of Artistic Genius: a Futurist Manifesto (1914)’ by Bruno Corra and Emilio Settimelli (in Rainey 2009), and McDonald was referring in particular to point 5 of the Manifesto:

THE PRODUCER OF CREATIVE ARTISTIC FORCES MUST JOIN THE COMMERCIAL STRUCTURE WHICH IS THE MUSCLE OF MODERN LIFE. MONEY IS ONE OF THE MOST FORMIDABLY AND BRUTALLY SOLID POINTS OF THE REALITY IN WHICH WE LIVE. TURNING TO IT WILL SUFFICE TO ELIMINATE ALL POSSIBILITY OF ERROR AND UNPUNISHED INJUSTICE. FURTHER, A GOOD INJECTION OF COMMERCIAL SERUM WILL DIRECTLY PRODUCE IN THE INTELLECTUAL CREATOR’S BLOODSTREAM AN EXACT AWARENESS OF HIS RIGHTS AND RESPONSIBILITIES. (Rainey 2009, 186 block capital letters in original).

McDonald is right in pointing out the eerily similarities between the ‘crypto scene’ and the Futurists, with their belief in ‘measurements’ and the superior power of technology over a flawed humanity, in fact it is hard not to view their aspiration towards the elimination of ‘all possibility of error,’ or their faith in money – a ‘solid point of reality’ – as a ‘kind of’ prefiguration of the blockchain (in the same way as Beeple’s work was a ‘kind of’ Duchampian readymade).

Also, it is easy to understand why Crypto art enthusiasts rejoice at discovering affinities with previous avant-garde movements – Futurism, Conceptualism, Street Art – such an art history cachet can turn into significant amounts of cash for some happy few, it can open the wallets of crypto-investors and the exhibition doors of real and virtual museums, it stimulates critics’ interest, it lends artistic credibility to creations which might otherwise be just pictures of colourful Apes trading for outrageous prices.

One cannot help wondering what the Futurists, with their disdain for traditional cultural institutions, would have made of Alice, (full name To The Young Artists of Cyberspace) – a variation on the opening line ‘To The Young Artists of Italy’ of the Futurist Manifesto (1909) – that sold at Sotheby’s for 478,800 USD. Alice is the world's first ‘intelligent NFT’ (iNFT), and was created by artist Ben Gentilli's, (aka Robert Alice), and software developers Alethea AI (https://alethea.ai/). Alice is unlike any other NFT because she is powered by artificial intelligence and deep machine learning which allow her to hold conversations with an audience. The reason for her full name, in the words of Gentilli, is that ‘There hasn't really been a manifesto that's been written around NFTs’, and ‘That's the anchor for the entire idea, at least conceptually’ (Graves 2021).

In a conversation with artist Simon Denny, Gentilli expands on the conceptual links with Futurism,

Futurism stands at the genesis of the idea of the art manifesto, producing the first. … This work [To the Young Artists of Cyberspace] sits at a similar moment in history. Speed, machines and power were all primary concerns in the Futurist manifestos, much as they are recurring today. The crypto space holds equally parts utopic hope and equal parts a kind of techno-fascism … I hope this is a moment to recognise that technology is agnostic and, therefore, it functions as simply a mirror to ourselves …  To the Young Artists of Cyberspace … takes on issues prevalent in AI and crypto today much as they were in the age of Futurism. (Denny 2021, emphasis mine)

Gentilli follows the familiar crypto-narrative which considers technology as ‘agnostic’, detached from societal influences, only to advocate a (very welcome) contribution from society in the form of collective decisions about the future. He is also not new to ‘experimentations’, in fact his Block 21, Portraits of a Mind – composed of two parts, a physical painting and digital NFT – was the first NFT artwork to be sold by Christie's for 131,250 USD (October 2020).¹⁵

The Young Artists of Cyberspace is predictably described on Sotheby’s auction page in flamboyant terms, ‘A landmark development in both the history of art and NFTs’, an ‘historic iNFT’ which

asks many thought provoking questions – What do interactive and intelligent relationships between artwork and its viewer mean for the trajectory of art history? How does this change our definition of art? How is ownership defined in an age of intelligent artforms? Where does identity lie as an iNFT develops and learns? Where does creativity lie? With the artist or the AI – or even perhaps the audience as a decentralised cultural collective? (Sotheby’s 2021)

Such questions, not all entirely new, will be at the critical core of multi-disciplinary inquiry for years to come.

When visiting the home page of Alethea AI (the software developers behind Alice https://alethea.ai/) – ironically ‘alethea’ derives from the ancient Greek word for ‘truth’ – one is presented with ‘Noah’s Ark’, described as an ‘intelligent Metaverse that aims to preserve and evolve the culture and collective intelligence of the human species’; no less! The avatars NFTs of Lincoln, an Ape, Cleopatra and Alice, among others, greet visitors in a sort of post-postmodernist visual pastiche, they are positioned on the arch of a deep blue digital sky ready to come ‘alive’ like characters in a gamified Metaverse. The Alethea AI project, and its Whitepaper in particular, (https://alethea.gitbook.io/alethea-ai-whitepaper/) would require a more detailed analysis, however I just wish to point out the recurrent messianic tone and themes typical of Abrahamic religions first detected with regard to Gene Kogan’s Abraham, ‘an open project to make an autonomous artificial artist, a crowd-sourced AI that generates art’ (Notaro 2020). It looks like the Metaverse, for all its ‘ground-breaking’ self-narrative, is not immune from crusading ‘techno-fervour’ wrapped up in traditional religious (male) tropes.

And yet, according to Matt Schapiro, founder of imnotArt, ‘a community of artists, programmers, and collectors joining together to usher in a new era of art history’ (https://www.imnotart.com/), a hybrid virtual-physical NFT gallery located simultaneously in the Island of Berlin in Cryptovoxels (a virtual world and metaverse powered by the Ethereum blockchain), and in Chicago (USA), ‘the community of the metaverse is incredibly diverse in terms of race, gender, and sexuality’ (Valenzuela 2021). Awareness of lack of diversity is always welcome, and time will tell if Cryptovoxels will prove to be as diverse as it purports to be, what is interesting is that imnoArt combines metaverse and physical gallery space which provides artists with options and community support to exhibit their NFTs creations.

The diversity card is also played by art critic, dealer, artist and curator Kenny Schachter, on the occasion of ‘NFT-ism: No Fear in Trying’, an exhibition delivered with Institut (an art world-led platform for NFTs, simultaneously in a physical gallery in London and in the Arium Metaverse (September 2021). Schachter trumpets his curatorial vision to ‘do what no one has done before! FOCUS ON THE ART, art from a wide, diverse universe of talent from all walks of life’. (https://unitlondon.com/whats-on/84-group-exhibition-covent-garden-nftism-no-fear-in-trying/)

Established auction houses have been engaging with NFTs for several years, the latest development is Sotheby's launch in October 2021 of its own NFT platform, aptly called Sotheby’s Metaverse – first auction house to do so. First offering were ten unminted Chromie Squiggles by NFT artist Snowfro. The concept for the work

is based on generative minting, in which an algorithm created by the artist is fed onto the blockchain and it is this programme that determines the outcome for each individual buyer. Bringing conceptual art back to the art market, it is in the moment of minting that the artwork is created. Significantly within this process, the person minting the artwork is part of the artistic production and final output. (https://metaverse.sothebys.com/chromie-squiggle-mint-it)

Once again, links with Conceptualism are established, ‘Conceptual art has long played with the concept of what the collector receives, yet the generative format, as developed by Art Blocks, plays with notions of chance and surprise in which the collector is purchasing an artwork with all its generative possibilities’ (https://metaverse.sothebys.com/chromie-squiggle-mint-it).

It is exactly in these ‘generative possibilities’ that the most intriguing aspects of iNFTs come ‘alive’ when viewed not from a moral panic perspective ‘a la Frankenstein’, rather from a post-humanist art history which considers ‘all art works, from cave paintings to … contemporary experiments with all kinds of technologies, as having been produced by human artists in an assembly with a plethora of nonhuman agents’ (Zylinska 2020, 54 emphasis in original). The key issue, however, is whether the AI (art) component of iNFTs, which demands to be situated in the context of wider socio-political and ecological issues, can be reconciled, or even coexist from a critical standpoint, with the ‘beyond society’ fallacy and assetization tendency of crypto-based economy.

Conclusions

‘He escaped once before. In just a few hours, he managed

to get thousands of people to invest in NFTs … 

Another 30 seconds in that room and you would have

started considering NFTs as a viable investment’.

Victor Chaos, South Park

2021 has been an important year for NFTs, as the choice of epigraphs from the world of comedy in this article attest, non-fungible tokens have made it into popular culture, and this is hardly surprising given that the aesthetic of the most well-known NFTs, Crypto Punks and Crypto Kitties, is a populist one of simulacra, of colourful, kaledoiscopic ‘nothingness’, which is a paradoxical juxtaposition to their nostalgia-infused longing for finding value in rarity and originality. Such populist aesthetic might explain why, to quote from the title of a January (2022) ArtNews post, ‘Wikipedia Editors Have Voted Not to Classify NFTs as Art, Sparking Outrage in the Crypto Community’. The debate, among editors, was on whether or not to include Beeple’s sale in the Wikipedia page listing the most expensive art sales. At the time of writing (just a few days after the ArtNews post was published), Beeple’s sale, initially excluded, has been reinstated in the list (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most_expensive_artworks_by_living_artists). The Crypto community’s outrage must have been heard loud and clear. Also, as it has been pointed out above, Wikipedia itself has been ‘tokenised’ in the form of its first page ‘Hello World!’, an NFT with, in the words of Jimmy Wales an ‘artistic concept’ behind it (emphasis mine).

This is further evidence that, as I have strived to demonstrate, the story about NFTs is an ambiguously intricate one, it mixes avant-garde and conservatism, experimentalism and dogmatism, anarchism and techno-scientific capitalism with a splash of gamification for good measure. NFTs, are ‘the latest playful creations in this realm’ as Berners-Lee claims, they are about joy and fun (much needed during a pandemic!), but they also express that very human desire for perpetuity, to leave, in the words of Krista Kim quoted above, a ‘record of what we have done’. And perhaps it doesn’t matter if such desires sound naïve, a touch brazen or even if they prove to be misplaced because the trusted technology is bound to become, in time, obsolete. Perhaps it is not just by finding affinities with previous artistic movements like Conceptualism or Futurism (as important as such art histories are) that Crypto art might acquire its ‘art’ credentials, rather it is in the practice and critical reflections of artists/researchers like Primavera De Filippi (https://cyber.harvard.edu/people/pdefilippi), Simon Denny (https://simondenny.net/), Rhea Myers (https://rhea.art/), all collaborating, in various stages and modalities, with Furtherfield (https://www.furtherfield.org/), a not-for-profit international community hub for arts, technology and social change. Furtherfield’s contribution to ‘re:thinking the blockchain’, to quote the title of their pioneering book from 2017, has been invaluable in reflecting upon and exposing the ambiguity of a technology which ‘seems to offer as many risks of a dystopian future as emancipatory opportunities’ (Catlow et al. 2017, 31). Contrary to Catlow though, I remain sceptical about the NFTs and their associated technologies ‘revolutionary’ claims to harness the emancipatory potential for decentralization and diversity. The visionary poetics of some artists using and rethinking the blockchain cannot make up for the powerful ‘cold cryptocurrency nexus’ (to paraphrase the old-fashioned Marxist term ‘cold cash nexus’), and the melting away of any ‘solid’ truly revolutionary value, except the one which exists within the asset logic of the blockchain.

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Additional information

Notes on contributors

Anna Notaro

Anna Notaro is Reader in contemporary media theory at Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art & Design, University of Dundee (UK). Over her academic career she has always worked across disciplinary boundaries combining an interest for literary analysis and critical theory with a broad Cultural/Media Studies approach. Her research outputs reflect her intellectual eclecticism, in fact she has published widely in the field of urban visual culture and digital culture tackling topics as diverse as: the blogosphere, authorship, cinema & new technology, digital celebrity, electronic textuality, the ‘future of the book’, the concept of nostalgia and A.I. art. More about Anna Notaro’s research interests at her home page: www.notarofam.com/annawork. She can be found on Twitter: @DrAnnaNotaro.

Notes

1 Blockchain’s foundations ‘were laid by Scott Stornetta and Stuart Haber in the 1990s with their work on time-stamping digital documents through hash functions, but it only came into its own in 2009 with the launch of Satoshi Nakamoto’s Bitcoin ledger. Within 10 years, 5,000 alternative blockchains have been created, many with numerous applications beyond peer-to-peer electronic cash exchange. Smart contracts, dApps and NFTs are just a few examples of the potential that blockchain technology offers us in this brave new world of decentralized exchange of value and ownership’ (Valenzuela 2021).

2 True to the secretive nature of the term ‘crypto’, the same founder of Bitcoin, Satoshi Nakamoto, is just the name used by the presumed pseudonymous person or persons. A recent lawsuit in Florida shed new interest on the possible identity of Nakamoto (Kay 2021).

3 ‘Immutable Record’ is the name of the web page dedicated to such anniversaries, it also includes a Blockchain timeline featuring milestones events in its history, ironically though, at the time of writing this article, one reads that far from being immutable the timeline is ‘still under construction and subject to change’.

4 ETH is short for Ether, the native cryptocurrency of the Ethereum platform, the transactional token that pays for all the services performed on the network.

5 It was bought by Iranian crypto entrepreneur Sina Estavi who enthusiastically proclaimed ‘This is not just a tweet! … years later people will realize the true value of this tweet, like the Mona Lisa Painting’ https://twitter.com/sinaEstavi/status/1374063984396136450?. But his efforts to re-sell it have run aground, with a top bid of just $6,800 as of April 14, 2022.

6 The world of academia has provided NFTs (and cryptocurrencies) a certain degree of credibility, the private university of Nicosia in Cyprus was the first university in the world to recognise cryptocurrency and blockchain as a broad field of academic study by launching a master’s degree in the area (2013), and a master in ‘metaverse systems’ in September 2022 https://www.unic.ac.cy/openmetaverse/. From a crypto sceptic perspective, the ‘spectrum of harm’ of crypto and blockchain technology has been best articulated by programmer Stephen Diehl (@smdiehl) in a Twitter thread of December 26, 2021 https://twitter.com/smdiehl/status/1475075921686282240.

7 The alternative is ‘proof of stake’ (PoS). A paradigm that, in the words of proponents like Jason Bailey, ‘will reduce energy consumption of NFTs by 99%’. Bailey adds the common refrain that ‘Most technologies start off inefficiently and improve over time’ and in the end, ‘Exchanging some limited short-term inefficiency in the NFT process to build a new decentralized art market in which hopefully everyone can participate and nobody needs to fly anywhere or ship and store art seems like a fair trade-off’ (Estorick and Jochim 2021). For a detailed critique of the ‘Proof of stake’ defined as a ‘scam’ see (Lowe 2021).

8 As far as the museum sector is concerned, ‘uncertainly over artwork copyright also lingers … . NFTs could serve as the springboard and an opportunity for the museum sector and the academic community alike, to explore, understand and embrace the decentralised future of the Internet’ (Valeonti et al. 2021). An interesting initiative to use philanthropic NFTs to support the restoration of established physical collections is the one initiated by the Lobcowicz Collection in Prague (CZ) in October 2021 (https://www.nfcastle.com/).

9 As Shaw puts it: ‘Women account for just 16% of the NFT art market, according to a report published by the research firm ArtTactic … Overall, the top 25% of artists account for almost 90% of total values’, interestingly, ‘ the only known woman to make it into the top ten NFT artists is the musician Grimes, whose sales total $8.9m to date, compared with Winkelman’s [aka Beeple] $50.8m’. On a positive note, ‘there appears to be some movement towards collaborations and collectives, which now account for almost a quarter of NFT sales’ (Shaw 2021). For updated data on NFTs sales https://nonfungible.com/market/history. For some experts ‘There are 10,000 new pieces each and every day ready to go’, however ‘There are not 10,000 new buyers every day to sustain this incredible production … Stability in the NFT market would require greater attention from the public to attract traditional investors, as well as greater comfort with cryptocurrencies … This development is likely still years away’ (Graupner 2021).

10 A smart contract is a self-executing contract in which the terms of the agreement between seller and buyers are written into lines of code existing in the blockchain network. Smart contracts allow transactions to happen without the need for a legal entity or central authority.

11 Julian Oliver, critical engineer, educator, artist and activist, is in full agreement on this point, as he wrote in a Twitter thread of December 4, 2021 ‘No blockchain is wholly decentralised, nor do they escape the owner/user binary. Beyond the application & network layers they are singular ledgers, ultimately governed by their creators & any investors buying stake – a handful of people. I think more people need to grasp this’ (https://twitter.com/julian0liver/status/1467256016316293121).

12 It has to be noted that the transformation of artworks into stock-like tools is nothing entirely new, one might think for example of Masterworks, a private art investment firm whose mission is to ‘democratize’ art investing (https://www.masterworks.io/about/about-masterworks) by selling shares in its collection of blue-chip works by Banksy, Basquiat, KAWS, Haring and Warhol.

13 In an interview with Open Culture Eno admits, ‘People I like and trust are convinced [NFTs] are the best thing since sliced bread, so I wish I could have a more positive view but right now I mainly see hustlers looking for suckers’ (Jones 2021).

14 And yet Noah Davis seems to contradict himself when he categorises Beeple’s work as having a very ‘populist aesthetic’. ‘People have described it as screen-saver art, or visual junk food, and I think that’s totally appropriate to categorize it that way – if you want to look at it from a sort of privileged, ivory-tower perspective. But this movement has nothing to do with Donald Judd or minimalism or the concerns of the art-historical canon. If art history is a tree of life, then cryptoart has been evolving in a primordial soup that’s nearby. It’s a totally different beast. Comparisons are futile, but the closest one I can think of is street art, because it was so different from the aesthetic of contemporary art and because it made all of the hifalutin art people cringe (Schneier 2021 emphasis mine).

15 As we read from Christie’s auction page the physical component of the art work Portraits of a Mind is ‘one artist’s response to the inevitability of digital degradation, to the idea of Bitcoin’s founding code (v0.1.0) as a Magna Carta of the 21st century. The largest work of art in blockchain’s history, the forty paintings that comprise Portraits of a Mind stretch to over fifty meters long and compromise a full transcription of the 12.3 million digits of code that first launched the iconic technology in 2008’. Also, the conceptualist influences of Roman Opalka (1931–2011) and On Kawara (1932–2014) are acknowledged. As for the NFT component, Block 21, it is described as sitting ‘on top of the "electronic superhighway" to borrow the phrase from video art pioneer Nam June Paik (1932–2006) (https://www.christies.com/en/lot/lot-6283759).