Image via Wiki­me­dia Com­mons

It can feel, in our inequal­i­ty-addled world, that we have lit­tle left in com­mon — that there is no “we,” just us and them. But mul­ti­ple crises dri­ving us apart have the poten­tial to unite the species. After all, a rapid­ly warm­ing plan­et and glob­al pan­dem­ic do threat­en us all, even if they don’t threat­en us equal­ly. Do solu­tions exist in the cre­ation of new forms of pri­vate prop­er­ty, new ways of mov­ing cap­i­tal around the world? Can the extinc­tion-lev­el byprod­ucts of cap­i­tal­ist com­mod­i­fi­ca­tion and waste be mit­i­gat­ed by inge­nious new forms of finan­cial­iza­tion? These seem to be the argu­ments made by pur­vey­ors of cryp­tocur­ren­cy and NFTs, an acronym mean­ing non fun­gi­ble tokens and — if you haven’t noticed — the only thing any­one in the art world seems to talk about any­more. Why?

Bri­an Eno has put his opin­ion on the mat­ter quite blunt­ly in a recent inter­view. “NFTs seem to me just a way for artists to get a lit­tle piece of the action from glob­al cap­i­tal­ism,” he tells The Cryp­to Syl­labus. “How sweet — now artists can become lit­tle cap­i­tal­ist ass­holes as well.” He obvi­ous­ly dis­ap­proves of using art sole­ly to gen­er­ate prof­it, but then if we know any­thing about Eno’s the­o­ry of cre­ativ­i­ty and influ­ence over the past sev­er­al decades, it’s that he believes the guid­ing rea­son for art is to gen­er­ate more art.

“If I had pri­mar­i­ly want­ed to make mon­ey I would have had a dif­fer­ent career as a dif­fer­ent kind of per­son. I prob­a­bly would­n’t have cho­sen to be an artist.” There’s utter­ly no use in try­ing to peg Eno as techno­pho­bic or out of touch; quite the con­trary. But the fic­tion­al finan­cial prod­ucts that have invad­ed every oth­er sphere of life have no place in the arts, he argues.

When asked why NFTs are tout­ed as a sal­va­tion for artists and the art world by cryp­tocur­ren­cy vision­ar­ies, includ­ing many of his friends and col­lab­o­ra­tors, Eno replies:

I can under­stand why the peo­ple who’ve done well from it are pleased, and it’s nat­ur­al enough in a lib­er­tar­i­an world to believe that some­thing that ben­e­fits you must auto­mat­i­cal­ly be ‘right’ for the whole world. That belief is a ver­sion of what I call ‘auto­mati­cism’: the idea that if you leave things alone and let some­thing or oth­er – the mar­ket, nature, human will – take its course unim­ped­ed you will auto­mat­i­cal­ly get a bet­ter result than you would by tin­ker­ing with it. The peo­ple who hold beliefs of this kind don’t have any qualms about tin­ker­ing them­selves but just want a sit­u­a­tion where nobody else gets to tin­ker. Espe­cial­ly the state.

That the sale of NFTs have only ben­e­fit­ted very few — to the tune of $69 mil­lion in a sin­gle sale in a recent high-pro­file case — does­n’t seem par­tic­u­lar­ly trou­ble­some to those who insist on their ben­e­fits. Nor do the cre­ators of NFTs seem both­ered by the enor­mous ener­gy over­head required by the tech­nol­o­gy, “an eco­log­i­cal night­mare pyra­mid scheme,” writes Syn­th­topia — of which Eno says: “in a warm­ing world a new tech­nol­o­gy that uses vast amounts of ener­gy as ‘proof of work’ — that’s to say, sim­ply to estab­lish a cer­tain age of exclu­siv­i­ty — real­ly is quite insane.”

Eno read­i­ly answers ques­tions about why NFTs seem so glam­orous — it’s no great mys­tery, just a new form of accu­mu­la­tion, com­mod­i­fi­ca­tion and waste, one in par­tic­u­lar that adds noth­ing to the world while has­ten­ing a cli­mate col­lapse. NFTs are the “ready­made reversed,” David Joselit argues: Where “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.”

The dis­course around NFTs also seems to lib­er­ate art from the cat­e­go­ry of art, and all that has meant to humankind for mil­len­nia as a com­mu­nal prac­tice, reduc­ing cre­ative pro­duc­tions to dig­i­tal cer­tifi­cates of authen­tic­i­ty. “I am try­ing to keep an open mind about these ques­tions,” 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.”

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

What are Non-Fun­gi­ble Tokens (NFTs)? And How Can a Work of Dig­i­tal Art Sell for $69 Mil­lion

What Is Blockchain? Three Videos Explain the New Tech­nol­o­gy That Promis­es to Change Our World

Cryp­tocur­ren­cy and Blockchain: An Intro­duc­tion to Dig­i­tal Currencies–A Free Online Cours­es from the Uni­ver­si­ty of Penn­syl­va­nia 

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

Val­ue in the art world depends on man­u­fac­tured desire for objects that serve no pur­pose and have no intrin­sic mean­ing out­side of the sto­ries that sur­round them, which is why it can be easy to fool oth­ers with fraud­u­lent copies. Col­lec­tors and experts are often eager to believe a well-told tale of spe­cial prove­nance. As Orson Welles says in F is for Fake, “Lots of oys­ters, only a few pearls. Rar­i­ty. The chief cause and encour­age­ment of fak­ery and phoni­ness.”

“Con­cepts of fak­ery and orig­i­nal­i­ty bounce off one anoth­er as reflec­tions,” Lidi­ja Groz­dan­ic writes of Welles’ doc­u­men­tary on “our innate infat­u­a­tion with exclu­siv­i­ty,” a film made when the inter­net con­sist­ed of 36 routers and 42 host com­put­ers — in total (includ­ing a link in Hawaii!). Now we are immersed in hyper­re­al­i­ty. Copies of dig­i­tal art­works are indis­tin­guish­able from each oth­er, since they can­not be said to exist in any mate­r­i­al sense. How can they be authen­ti­cat­ed? How can they become exclu­sive place­hold­ers for wealth?

The ques­tions have been tak­en up, and answered rather abrupt­ly, it seems, by the archi­tects of blockchain tech­nol­o­gy, who bring us NFTs, or “Non-Fun­gi­ble Tokens,” an acronym and phrase­ol­o­gy you’ve sure­ly heard, whether you’ve felt inclined to learn what they mean. The videos fea­tured today offer brief expla­na­tions, by ref­er­ence espe­cial­ly to the case of South Car­oli­na-based dig­i­tal artist named Mike Win­kle­mann, who goes by Beeple, and who first har­nessed the pow­er of NFTs to make mil­lions.

Most recent­ly, in a first-of-its-kind online auc­tion at Christies, Beeple’s mon­tage “‘Every­days — The First 5000 Days’… became the ‘What Does the Fox Say?’ of art sales,” writes Erin Grif­fiths at The New York Times.

A cryp­to whale known only by the pseu­do­nym Metako­van paid $69 mil­lion (with fees) for some indis­crim­i­nate­ly col­lat­ed pic­tures of car­toon mon­sters, gross-out gags and a breast­feed­ing Don­ald Trump — which sud­den­ly makes this com­put­er illus­tra­tor the third-high­est-sell­ing artist alive.

The crit­i­cism is per­haps unfair. As Christies argues in its defense, the piece reveals “Beeple’s enor­mous evo­lu­tion as an artist” over five years. Spe­cial­ist Noah Davis calls the col­lage, stitched togeth­er from Beeple’s body of work on Insta­gram, “a kind of Duchampian ready­made.” But it does­n’t real­ly mat­ter if Beeple’s work is avant-garde high art.

The lib­er­tar­i­an econo-speak “non­fun­gi­ble token” reveals itself as part of a world divorced from the usu­al cri­te­ria art his­to­ri­ans, cura­tors, auc­tion hous­es, and oth­ers apply in their judg­ments of authen­tic­i­ty and worth. Instead, the val­ue of NFTs rests main­ly on the fact that they are exclu­sive, with­out par­tic­u­lar­ly high regard for what they include. One may love the work of Beeple, but we should be clear, “what Christie’s sold was not an object” — there is no object — “but a ‘non­fun­gi­ble token,’” which is “bit­coinese for unique string of char­ac­ters, logged on a blockchain,” that can­not be exchanged or replaced… like own­ing a Mon­et with­out own­ing a Mon­et.

Unlike the Wu Tang album Once Upon a Time in Shaolin, bought for $2 mil­lion in 2015 by Mar­tin Shkre­li, con­tent attached to NFTs can be shared, viewed, copied, etc. over and over. “Mil­lions of peo­ple have seen Beeple’s art,” the BBC explains, “and the image has been copied and shared count­less times. In many cas­es, the artist even retains the copy­right own­er­ship of their work, so they can con­tin­ue to pro­duce and sell copies.”

Oth­er sales of NFTs include a ver­sion of the 10-year-old inter­net meme Nyan Cat that sold for $600,000, a clip of LeBon James block­ing a shot for $100,000, and a pic­ture of Lind­say Lohan for $17,000, which then resold for $57,000. Lohan artic­u­lat­ed the NFT ethos in a state­ment, say­ing, “I believe in a world which is finan­cial­ly decen­tral­ized.” This is not a world where judg­ments about the val­ue of art and cul­ture can be cen­tral­ized either. But pow­er can be, pre­sum­ably, in the form of cur­ren­cy, cryp­to-and oth­er­wise, trad­ed in spec­u­la­tive bub­bles.

“Some peo­ple com­pare it to buy­ing an auto­graphed print,” the BBC writes. Some com­pare it to the age-old scams warned of in folk tales. David Ger­ard, author of Attack of the 50 Foot Blockchain, calls NFT sell­ers “cryp­to-grifters… the same guys who’ve always been at it, try­ing to come up with a new form of worth­less bean that they can sell for mon­ey.” This eter­nal scam exists beyond the bina­ries posed by F is for Fake. Orig­i­nal­i­ty, authen­tic­i­ty, or oth­er­wise are most­ly beside the point.

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

The Art Mar­ket Demys­ti­fied in Four Short Doc­u­men­taries

Banksy Shreds His $1.4 Mil­lion Paint­ing at Auc­tion, Tak­ing a Tra­di­tion of Artists Destroy­ing Art to New Heights

Warhol: The Bell­wether of the Art Mar­ket

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness.