Not holding my nose anymore
Or how I learned to stop worrying and love NFTS
This text charts a course through a personal journey — and personal opinions — around NFTs and my experience of them since late 2020. It is not a technical description of NFTs. I assume my readers have not been living under a rock for the last year.
Which makes me wonder, who are you, reading this now? I can’t know you, but I can tell you something about me: I am a highly critical person, sometimes (hopefully) in a way that is constructive and healthy — other times as a devil’s advocate of sorts. Critique is an important mental modality, a separation of the wheat from the chaff as it were, but must be checked for excess and self-aggrandizement. I hope to avoid these here, to conclude my journey with a constructive outcome, and open the door for conversations.
When NFTs started becoming a “thing” in the zeitgeist, circa early 2021/late 2020, I remember the sense of bafflement I shared with a lot of friends in creative industries. We were all scratching our heads at this seemingly odd method of monetization of what had previously been abundantly excessive digital “art” in our social feeds and in various scroll spaces.
This bafflement quickly combined with discomfort and mild disgust at how this new form of monetization of “art” seemed to have completely muddied the meaning of what “art” is and made crypto-millionaires out of somewhat mediocre designers and animators by labeling them “artists” and putting their work on a pedestal.
One could see a sort of victory cry coming out of chat streams (Twitter, Discord, some crypto-focused news outlets) where “digital artists” who had felt unrecognized by the contemporary art world were now “vindicated”. This was not because their work was recognized for its quality, rather because it was starting to sell for prices that were traditionally expected only for the fine art world. In essence, taking the worst aspect of the art world (its valuation of art as an asset in the financial sense) and making it accessible — no — desirable, to all. This could of course have been an excellent thing, except that it wasn’t. The leveling from the bottom that was taking place felt in no way conducive to a healthy renewal of an unfair art system, rather the translation or expansion of the framework onto a new field.
Despite doing my best to turn away, NFT’s became like the Kardashians, this “thing” you wish you never had heard of, that you can’t unsee or avoid. I did experiment a bit with the field, curious about its inner workings, and through a winding route of research into some of the foundational aspects of what could be called a “crypto outlook” on the world, It took me a long time to understand to see the value behind the ugly facade.
To get there, I had to overcome a few ugly beasts along the way: the attempts at creating and fostering new ideologies that the kool-aid drinkers threw left and right as the future of culture, a new collective dream within “everyone’s” reach (if you had a computer, a credit card, a bank account, the technological know-how to create a crypto wallet, time to spend creating — promoting — following up with endless communication channels, and then also maybe living a life)
1/”The Ownership Economy!” :
… now people “are construed on the model of the contemporary firm,” meaning that people are “expected to comport themselves in ways that maximize their capital value in the present and enhance their future value.” Many of us are forced to become as valuable as we can, thereby creating the most human capital possible. And as firms have moved from producing goods and services to becoming more lucrative through finance, the tiny businesses (us) have started to follow suit.
The first thing that shocked me when I started seeing the now so-called “overpriced Jpegs” go on sale was that the market forces that drive our lives had managed to find one more thing to chew on: digital art. Wait, what could be next? In its constant need for growth, would the market find other “unsellable” things to package and up and sell? Were we coming closer and closer to a “Black Mirror” type society where our thoughts or dreams or dearest memories might become “assets”?
In a sense, digital art is, by default, made to be reproduced. By its very digital nature, there is nothing unique about the individual structure of an image or video file, meaning that it can be copied perfectly, but not just like a photographer can make new prints from a negative — there is no stable “master” from which all copies are made. In fact, if you create digital art, you know that you usually start with some kind of canvas, and in this canvas, you have endless parameters to tweak. As long as you can run the same software you used to create the image, you can keep changing the output (this is true to a certain extent of film photography as well — you can always change the exposure time or balance of chemicals when developing a negative) In fact, one thing that is spectacular about digital assets is that they can be reproduced and mutated ad infinitum, which is in fact their core value (a value that has sadly been monetized by platforms that profit from the endless reproduction of these images).
In a sense digital assets are the freest of all, unbounded, endlessly malleable and re-usable, readable by humans and machines alike, they are like the water of the digital realm, pure abundance.
The birth of NFTs came from an idea that directly opposed this basic attribute of digital media, the creation of “artificial scarcity” — coming close to the concept of an “original”- but that is only a limited analogy, as I just hinted at the fragility of a digital “original”. What NFTs allowed for is more of a game of trust, where someone says: this is mine. And by something being mine, you can then desire it, and if you desire it, someone else might want it, etc…The assets themselves were still free to reproduce and travel, but a small group of people was given the right to claim ownership.
“‘Digital scarcity’ is an anti-human evolution ideology that imposes board game-like rules which serve no purpose than to preserve the game itself — to hide the internal contradictions of capitalism that become painfully obvious in an area of culture that has overcome scarcity.”
https://www.garbageday.email/p/right-clickers-vs-the-monkey-jpg
Let’s agree temporarily to call NFTs some kind of “artificial original”, which is basically applying a concept from the physical world to the digital realm. And my personal response to this silly idea was to push it to an extreme, in this batch of NFTs I put for sale, playing with the idea of a series of things that (for now) could never be sold, owned, or even experienced again.
The way that this type of ownership was sensed, through the lens of social media, the news, and other loud utterances in meatspace, was that this was really a deeper form of financialization of art. You would hear proponents of NFTs claiming loudly that they were finally “democratizing” the art market. But let’s remember that for such a thing to happen, i.e having enough people ready to spend their hard-earned money on art, you have to have achieved a state of society where all other needs are fully met. What then became apparent (say this with Adam Curtis’s voice) was that in fact, we weren’t seeing lots of middle-class people spending their savings or bonuses or stimulus money on NFTs, it was mostly cryptocurrency holders spending the tokens they had bought during bear markets at very low prices and were now so flush with them that parking them into potentially more valuable investments was just a strategic move. So digital currencies were being used to buy digital assets, which, with all the hype associated with the high prices and occasional large secondary market sales, encouraged more people to jump into the fray, raising the value of the digital currencies and the digital assets in tandem. It all seemed like a magic trick, a really smart hive mind move. Maybe this magic trick was the most artful part of the whole thing, a bit like a “Wag the Dog” operation, a PR stunt so well-orchestrated that it could be read at multiple levels, from crypto adoption to a sudden deep concern for “creatives”, from self-enrichment to a form of socialist wealth distribution, all packaged in a gesture that seemed inscrutable to the majority of the human population.
But in fact, it consisted of a “reduction”: to take something capable of carrying so much meaning, be pregnant with so much potential — art — and reduce it to being a store of value. Conversely, it allowed for so much “bad” art to emerge and somehow qualify as art because it could evidently be pointed at as a store of value.
2/Art as pretext :
“In a world like this, I realized that art and society as I understood them simply could not exist. I understood art to be a necessary accouterment of urban life, a democratic social field of sublimated anxiety, adventure, violence, fast dancing, sharp talk, and contentious civility. I assumed that free citizens cultivated their responsiveness to works of art in order to mitigate their narcissism and fuel their imaginary grasp of that which is irrevocably beyond themselves.”
Dave Hickey, somewhere in “The Perfect Wave”
The first batch of NFT’s to “make it big” in the crypto art world were projects that looked like fodder that had been populating social media for a while. Poor images that showed skills with 3d software and render engines, but not much in the department of mental stimulation. It reminded me of the paintings you see in the streets of big cities, stalls designed to sell works that are “almost” art. They have all the right attributes: a canvas, a frame, a price — just not that kick that immediately identifies an object as “having art”.
It felt like illustration, record cover art, book cover design, magazine layout, visual fx exercises, motion design, advertising imagery, stock photography all had been somehow promoted, no longer the second class citizens of the creative sphere (fine artists being the aristocrats), they somehow could now detach themselves from serving other fields and interests (literature, music, film, brands, events, clients etc..) and be valued in and of themselves, without context.
A lot of people will tell you about how NFTs changed their lives or brought them out of poverty, or “democratized” the art world, etc…And you will also hear A LOT about the cost of things, their circulation, their life as an asset, artists who come up with smart ways to sell, etc…What you won’t hear a lot about is the artwork itself, its context, what it responds to, what it relates to, where it places itself. The reason is that a large amount of it isn’t worth calling art, it gains our attention through its valuation (and it doesn’t help that people call this art “Crypto-art”, since the art itself if often unrelated to crypto, unless it is specifically designed with properties of the blockchain as key attributes)
A very large majority of the NFTs I’ve seen, across all platforms, and mostly the ones that have sold well, will usually cause a similar level of emotion as looking at a Netflix loading screen.. They may be smart, they may have nice aesthetic features, and in some cases, you might even say to yourself: “nice!”. But generally, the level of emotional connection is at its lowest. The one emotion that runs rampant in the NFT space is the chest-beating satisfaction of having sold your work this amount or that amount, or how having secondary market sales really justifies that it is, in fact, art. But these large amounts of financial energy injected into the work in fact do more to detach the work from “artfulness” and more to inject it with a sense of utility as if some financial whiz kid had invented a new kind of financial instrument and was celebrating its existence.
Oh, the days of people collecting art for the love of art (or artists) feels long gone in this bull market. The MOST common question I heard was “tell me about the artist’s market” which, in days of old, would have you cast out of line for an artist’s work. Nonetheless, the financial gesture of selling seems to be becoming the art. Let us all bear in mind that Andy Warhol predicted this when he wrote, “I no longer wish to be known as an artist. Call me a business artist.”
Jerry Gagosian, Art Basel Miami Beach 2021 Newsletter, Dec 8th 2021 (paywall)
I don’t mean to start developing a definition of art vs non-art, but what I can say is that art has a much deeper effect than simple emotions or aesthetic appreciation. These can fade, they are like satisfaction or irritation, very quick to come and, often, to pass. The relationship I have with artists who have touched me is more akin to that of a complex piece of furniture being installed in my psychological makeup. Drawers within drawers, I can’t quite wrap my head around what this amorphous yet clearly idiosyncratic entity is up to as it enters into a symbiotic relationship with my psyche. I may feel a range of emotions, puzzlement, extreme inspiration, simultaneous repulsion and attraction, and other such hard to pin down feelings. There are some artists (at the moment I feel this in particular with Adrián Villar Rojas and David Altmejd) who achieve this type of complex and ongoing re-arrangement and stretching of my mind and soul. There would be a lot more to say about this type of exchange, but let’s just say that in the context of the current world of NFTs, I haven’t had the luck to encounter that level of spark.
There are systemic reasons for this paucity of depth, one of them obviously being the endless scrollable stream itself, and what it’s done to our ability to engage with things deeply. Pop culture as a whole also contributes to a flattening of complexity and nuance, so do speed and a culture of success, but more on that below.
If you really want to know what art is, the final answer is here
3/Professional Exhibitionism x Advanced Sales Skills
“Half of the misery in the world is caused by people whose only talent is to worm their way into positions for which they otherwise have no competence. Conversely, how many talented individuals remain forever in obscurity for the lack of one ability : self-promotion”
Simon Leys on Victor Hugo in “The Hall of Uselessness”
Any promotional material about NFTs will involve some convoluted text like “boundary-pushing, blurring the lines, genre-defying” etc… This kind of hyperbole has been in effect across the marketing speak of many forms of art (and of course, you know, EVERYTHING). The field I’ve worked in the most, New Media Art, is so full of these “blurring the lines” and “intersection of this and that” — endless cliches — that it isn’t surprising to hear that language re-appear in the crypto art scene. But what is interesting to point out here is that, most often, we are reading artists hyperboling about themselves.
What is now colloquially called “Web2” (the span of time where the internet became about social media, platforms, and less about experimentation and discovery) was a period in which artists were forced to master self-promotion to exist. No Instagram or Twitter? Good luck getting noticed by anyone, unless you were a more serious artist with a PR company or at least someone on your payroll managing the social “engagement” with your work.
Self-promotion has become so important that the artists who succeed are the ones who are the most comfortable selling themselves, often using marketing speak and pointing out anything that an audience might find catchy about their art (it’s made with tons of data! — I did this with code! — I worked on this for 10 years!). As we know by now, those types of artists are rarely the ones that have the greatest impact on us, they are just the ones that manage to always be there when you look at your screens. The self-promoters rarely achieve the level of intensity as those that are busy making work, thinking, wondering what step to take next (rather than racking up followers).
In a sense, one could say that the crypto audience doesn’t know better than to buy these artists who create generic tropes because they are not aware of the fact that these are derivative of a thousand other artists, lurking in anonymity without the type of self-confidence required to point giant fingers at themselves.
This happens in the “trad’art” world as well, but with some differences. There are talent sniffers (gallerists, art advisers, curators), people who scour places where artists are groomed (MFA’s, Graduate programs, small shows) to help them rise (by reaching a wider audience). These people (and I’m not denying that some of them are sharks), define their careers by the amount of talent they can help develop, or by the impact a single talent can have. They attach their success to the artist’s success and offer their promotion and sales skills to the artists in exchange for their most compelling and personal work.
I definitely don’t want to get all kumbaya about the artist/gallerist/rep relationship, but there are considerable advantages, and the nft”o”verse, decrying galleries and institutions at every turn, doesn’t need to throw the baby away with the bathwater just because new intermediates (i.e crypto art platforms) are marketing the hell out of the idea that artists are now “in control”. It’s always useful to be suspicious of any business that tells you that they are there to support you (and thousands of others) when their existence depends on you working, in part, for them. Superrare, Makersplace, Niftygateway, and all the others need content as much as Instagram does.
In the NFT hypermarket artists are required to not only be good at selling themselves as a “brand”, but now they must also manage actual sales of their work, the pricing, the acceptance of bids, dealing with collectors, questions about the work’s price and secondary market value, etc…
Considering the amount of time it takes to amass followers on social media platforms, create compelling content to keep them hooked, manage your sales and income, make sure people are aware of the work’s availability on a marketplace, and all the mechanics that go with that, its astonishing that artists have time to actually create work, or to nurture their practice. The “democratization” of the art market is transforming all artists into salespeople for themselves, a task that only the savviest and self-confident can accomplish as it requires speaking confidently of what, one would hope, is a representation of some fairly personal aspect of oneself.
4/Zombie curation
The majority of the “curated” NFT projects always present the same artists. The curation does not extend very far beyond a small circle of “creators” who, again, seem to be comfortable with self-promotion, There are always exceptions, but good luck getting noticed if you don’t particularly like the exhibitionist culture of Twitter (“where thoughts become selfies™”) or Instagram. Even the fine art galleries that are starting to sell NFTs are engaging with artists who are already selling everywhere else. They sniff a seller, not a talent to develop.
Curation and presentation go together. Not all art is created equal, and there is a reason, both for artists and collectors, to separate things into distinct groups. These groupings are rooted in layers of meaning, the same layers of meaning I was referring to above in my furniture analogy. The deeper that layer cake, the more you feel excited to dive in. Why would you want to put someone who has spent years honing a visual, narrative, and cultural language next to a guy showing off a picture of his abs or a primate with a baseball cap? They have no connection but are flattened to a two-dimensional plane where neither can be enriched by the proximity to the others.
A lot of NFT platforms claim to be “curated”, but often that just means that someone has to be invited, and then what they put for sale is up to them. They all end up populating a visual feed that has no head or tail. You can of course sort through works, but it’s a bit like Amazon, you sort by price, by highest bid, by failed sale. There are no filters for “neo pixel art” or “Basquiat Clones” or “Shiny polygons”, yet
4/Crypto Culture and democratization
“Crypto has developed tools to create scarce claims on computerized representations of memes, to create scarce tradable claims on societal attention.”
Matt Levine — Money Stuff Newsletter Nov 30, 2021
There has been quite a bit written about NFTs as the “Trojan horse” of the Cryptoverse. By moving Crypto out of the world of pure finance and into popular culture, NFTs gave it more exposure and adoption than ever before. One thing that is often overlooked in this narrative is that the people buying and selling NFTs, in large part, seem to share some common traits. To list a few of them, one could say that they are more often than not natively digital, that their education and exposure to the world happened mostly through American (or Americanized) pop-culture — Hollywood movies and TV shows, cartoons, games, advertising, the early internet — and their understanding of art is a bit closer to video game creatures than to conceptual art. They collected baseball cards, action figures, barbie clothes, felt hyper-connected to brands and purveyors of pop culture.
The Cryptoverse loves history, but history can be 5 minutes ago. They will often announce that history is “being made” before the event actually occurred. For a culture dedicated to novelty and innovation, the reliance on history as a validator concept is surprising.
There is also a lot of talk about democracy, but simultaneously about exclusivity, clubs, expensive things. On one hand, considering the traditional art world as an old model to squash, but then reveling in recognition from old auction houses or contemporary art fairs.
This idea of art being “open to anyone” reminds me that anyone can become a minister in certain countries. People register online to state-sanctioned churches, get a card, and then officiate weddings. It’s a cute idea if you see religion and spirituality as a utility. But in fact, neither art nor religion relies on the same mechanisms as a democratic society. They require a confluence of traits that in fact enhance difference and uniqueness, the ability to say things most people will either not understand or not agree with until they do. An artist who pleases crowds is probably doomed to oblivion because crowds are fickle. An artist who works within criteria that are 100% their own has a lower chance of achieving sales, but a much higher chance at achieving some level of timelessness, as the most personal messages are, paradoxically, the most universal. This is why a lot of the art floating around the NFT space feels so stale to people who hang out around the trad art world, it feels derivative, decorative, eye candy, because it is.
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In conclusion, NFTs are part of a self-centered, rich in Kool-Aid, poor in meaning and run and gun, fast and loose. So why bother?
Let’s dive into part two of this mental re-adjustment. After all the unsavory aspects of the crypto art world described above, what would make us want to even come close to it?
0/You can’t avoid it
Trying to ignore NFTs today would be like trying to ignore social media in the second decade of the 21st century: a valiant effort, doomed to failure. If you hated the exhibitionism and shallowness that emerged from it, the vapid “influencer” culture, and the development of individuals as “brands”, you were not alone. However, refusing to engage with it meant disappearing into obscurity if you worked in most creative fields (and living working in an industry dominated by northern Americans — Europe’s recognition mechanisms are quite different). In the end, the way to benefit from social media was to develop a singular voice, identify your allies and ignore as much noise as possible (easier said than done). NFTs share similar energy. Their momentum won’t recede, and ignoring them would lead to playing catch up in the future. If you can stop holding your nose and dive in, learn as much as you can, and develop projects that benefit your ideals and perspectives, you will be leaning into the actual value of the technology versus the hype around it. If you see the amount of crap on NFT platforms and shudder at the idea of being involved in any way, that could in fact be a prompt to develop a better platform, better tools, onboard better artists, put the art back in, and filter out the rest.
1/The system itself, its foundations, are solid
I’ve spent a good amount of time learning from smart people building projects in the space that is quite poorly named “Web 3”, trying to understand the fundamental pieces that make this ecosystem hold together, the nuts and bolts, the ideas behind the code and the concepts behind the tools. These foundations are solid and amazingly full of good ideas. Ignore the anarcho-capitalist libertarian philosophies that fuel a lot of the crypto sphere, they are not necessary attributes of the field. What is at hand is in large part a rethinking of the way we will interact with products, services, media, i.e live with each other. Despite the fact that the underpinnings of the space are currently skewed towards those with a fairly copious amount of technical knowledge, the barriers of entry are being lowered regularly and steadily. A few months ago most artists were obligated to use platforms (OpenSea, Rarible, etc..) to mint their work and sell it. Now a series of tools are becoming available to bring the ownership and custody back to the artist.
Similarly, the smart contracts that underpin the NFT industry are becoming more sophisticated and flexible, giving artists, galleries, and collectors better tools for the creation and exchange of assets. We will need more people who really understand both the technical underpinnings and the real needs of artists (not the ones that are being marketed to artists) to build contracts that are, in fact, smart.
New people are entering the space, challenging the first generation of crypto crusaders. This new cohort is more interested in cultural conversations that shun the tropes of “democratization” and “transparency” and imbue this wild west’overse with substance. We have the tools, now let’s make the art actually valuable, giving us something we want to talk about, pick apart, play within our minds, extract meaning from it for ourselves and our societies.
The energies of art and money are like chemical substances that attract and repulse each other. Art doesn’t need money, and money doesn’t need art, but somehow in the confluence of their momentums today, we must steer the combustion towards the creation of food for the soul rather than just food on the table.
2/New ways of thinking have become available
NFTs are currently in a very primitive state. People are building projects that will allow them to become much more sophisticated vehicles. It is hard to outline these here because most of them don’t even exist yet, but one project that caught my mind recently is Rmrk. Some of the ideas in there, such as renting NFTs, making NFTs out of NFTs, combining NFTs are things that will soon become possible.
For example, it wouldn’t be absurd to expect that every media producing tool or platform (think cameras, recording devices, painting tools, 3d software) will transform any asset we create into an NFT, which means that not only is it associated with its creator in a way that can be verified, but also transforming the mass of human creation in the digital space into a set of building blocks for an artworld where creation and dissemination enter into a game of mutual enrichment.
In a sense, NFTs don’t necessarily need to be all about selling, they can exist as an immediate certificate of authenticity for any human expression. This, in turn, would mean that imagery is no longer “just out there”, it exists within a framework that clearly locks in time, context, and a clear line of provenance. If anything, this would encourage people to create new forms of free experimentation in response, and I can only see that as being a good thing.
Speaking of new ways of thinking, it is also important that we don’t get stuck in silly binaries. There is already enough of this in political discourse and in mainstream worldviews these days. The adoption of NFT's as a tool to authentify art is not a combat to the death between factions on the political left or right, even though those factions might want to pick the issue as a battle axe here and there. Let them, similar things happened with cell phone adoption, the internet, and so many other tech developments. It is fascinating to see critics and defenders retort to negative comments with ad hominem attacks, or with “bias” accusations — “you just don’t get it” — and more intellectual shortcuts. The best way to not move forward is to avoid dialogue.
Conclusion
As I’ve been operating this mental shift from a system I couldn’t see myself participating in, to something worth my time and energy, I constantly find myself in a state of doubt, shifting my weight between critique and excitement, but that’s a good thing. I’m looking forward to engaging with something I don’t blindly believe in because it will allow me to operate strategically, with trusted friends, and hopefully pick up the smell of bs from far enough away to stay honest with myself and my beliefs.
I hope this exploration has made it clear that what the NFT space is today is not its necessary state, good things are coming, as well as a lot more ugliness before the dust settles.
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Post Scriptum: This article is not about the ecological impact of NFTs, and will not even mention it. Others have dedicated enough time and effort to attacking and defending these positions. I feel that if you own a fridge, a dishwasher, and a few computers, it is hard to then see NFTs as the straw that broke the camel’s back, but that’s as much as I will venture into that debate.
Post-post Scriptum: I avoided mentioning a lot of interesting NFT projects, created by artists with a real voice and through a rigourous process. However, these projects tend to be drowned out by the noise, and exist in a sort of underground that a few people love to mention as a sort of counterpart to the NFT mainstream. These are certainly important, and we need more of them.