NFTs, Generative Art, and Sol LeWitt
The Concept-As-Commodity
Generative and code-based artworks are some of the most exciting pieces on the NFT market right now. Autoglyphs were recently featured in a Sotheby’s auction, Deafbeef’s Advection series spawned a furious bidding war at launch, and of course, multiple projects on the Art Blocks platform have now seen secondary sales over 50 Ξ. Generative art’s popularity among crypto collectors isn’t just based on aesthetics, it’s also rooted in the appreciation that these projects use the properties of blockchain as an essential part of of the artwork itself.
Generative art is a perfect fit for blockchain: elegantly-composed code can live on the blockchain forever, creating a unique sense of permanence to blockchain-recorded generative art.
However, we should acknowledge that the term “blockchain” does not mean the same thing as “NFT.” A non-fungible token is a specific implementation of blockchain technology that raises a distinct set of questions about ownership, authorship, and even the nature of art itself. And while the harmonic relationship between generative art and blockchain-in-general is widely recognized, I think that generative art also has a deep, illuminating relationship to ideas raised by non-fungible-tokens-specifically. To explore this relationship, it’s helpful to look back at some of the historical precedents to algorithmically-generated work to find some of the core conceptual ideas there, then come back to look at present-day NFTs using those ideas as a lens.
An NFT Thesis: Expressive Form vs Commodity Form
Here’s my major thesis: non-fungible tokens separate of an artwork’s expressive, or artistic form, from its commodity form. This is the most important way that NFTs are changing the art world. Over a number of essays and videos, I’ve been unpacking that thesis by discussing historical artworks that provided a precedent for that separation well well before blockchain was invented. Most notably, Yves Klein provided the most prescient and instructive art historical precedent for NFTs back in 1958. (If you haven’t read my essays about Yves Klein’s work and my own IKB token from 2017, definitely go do that.) But early generative art also performed that separation between “artistic” form and “commodity” form.
To show how, let’s take a look at an artist who was helping to define “Process Art” and “Conceptualism” in the 1960s, and doing so provided an elegant blueprint for both NFTs and Generative Art: Sol LeWitt.
Sol LeWitt Sold Receipts
This is Sol LeWitt’s wall drawing no 118, first conceived in 1971.
Sol LeWitt didn’t draw this himself. Rather, it was executed, or generated, by a team of relatively anonymous art installers who were following a the artist’s instructions. These instructions looked like this:
They were signed by LeWitt because these instructions, not the markings on the wall, were the real artwork.
Here’s another Wall Drawing, number 260A.
The instructions read:
On blue walls, all two-part combinations of white arcs from corners and sides, and white straight, not straight, and broken lines within a 36-inch (90 cm) grid.
If you’re interested in seeing more, the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art has the world’s largest collection of these. These artworks are considered so important that the museum is exhibiting 105 of them in an exhibition that they’re keeping up for twenty-five years.
The connection between the Sol LeWitt’s Wall Drawings and generative art should be obvious by now: Like all our favourite artists on Art Blocks, LeWitt has essentially written an algorithm that can be followed to create an infinite number of variations on the same artwork. The main difference is that LeWitt’s Wall drawings are written in plain English and executed by a team of gallery installers, rather than written in code and executed by a web browser.
So now let’s think about generative art as an evolution of a certain branch of conceptualism. The connection between conceptual work like LeWitt’s drawings and NFTs specifically is a little less obvious than the generative/blockchain synergy, but I think even way more interesting to think about. Put simply, conceptual art like LeWitt’s performs that conceptual and functional operation that I have made my primary thesis about NFTs: it severs the connection between the DISPLAY FORM of the art and the OWNED FORM of the art. That’s the thing that, I believe, makes NFTs truly revolutionary.
When a gallery or museum buys a Sol LeWitt Wall Drawing, they’re actually buying a certificate, signed by LeWitt, with the instructions on it. They’re not buying the wall drawing, they’re buying the idea of a Wall Drawing and they’re buying the authenticity of the Wall Drawing. In exchange for their million bucks (or whatever), the museum gets this signed certificate, it describes an artwork that theoretically could be reproduced by anyone, and they hang it beside the wall drawing to validate its authenticity.
Guess what? THAT’S A NON-FUNGIBLE TOKEN!
Early NFT Pioneers Recognized LeWitt
I’m not the only artist, or even the first artist, who’s recognized this connection. This is one of my favourite NFTs: Certificate of Inauthenticity by one of crypto-art’s most important figures, Rhea Myers.
In this piece, Myers acknowledges, and then toys with, the idea of the NFT as a proof of authorship and scarce legitimacy.
Myers commissioned a series of 3D-printable models of famous artworks. She then made these models available for download for free under an open-source license, so that anyone could reproduce them.
Then, Myers then created a series of NFT-artworks which could be printed out and presented next to the sculptures. These artworks are designed to look just like LeWitt’s Certificates. And unlike the 3D-printable files, these certificates were for sale. The artist is playing with the way authorship and value are assigned in conceptual art: anyone can make and identical version of the final product for free, but if you want to call it the real thing, you’ll have to pay.
Myers takes the game a step further, though, and flips that authorship/value equation upside down. You see, Myers’ certificates don’t confirm that the named artist created the work. Instead, they confirm that they didn’t. In a humourous twist, the collector pays for the privilege of verifiable proof that the artist named on the certificate was not actually involved in the production of the adjacent 3D-printed sculpture.
It’s a funny, clever piece that comments on contemporary art fabrication practices, references the artist’s own sense of identity, and also mines LeWitt and other conceptualists for ways of understanding NFT technology.
The Future: A Conceptual Art Renaissance?
As I write this, Generative Art is having a much-deserved moment in the sun. However, when I look at the wild success of Autoglyphs, Art Blocks and other generative art NFTs, I can’t help but think that they may be pointing to an equally bright future for other types of conceptual art.
By separating the expressive form of the artwork from its commodity form, NFTs allow us to buy, sell, and trade types of art that just didn’t have a market before. NFTs is that they can point to anything anything: a performance, a community process, or even just an abstract idea. As artists embrace unique processes for creating art, both on- and off-chain, and the market discovers them, being a conceptual artist or a performance artist might actually be a much more viable career path than it ever has been in my lifetime.
Art Blocks Project #118: LeWitt Generator Generator
If you’re interested in these ideas, please check out my upcoming drop on ArtBlocks. The piece is titled Sol LeWitt Generator Generator. Aesthetically, it takes the instructions from LeWitt’s Wall Drawing #118 (on a wall, randomly place a series of points and connect them with straight lines), but executes them on algorithmically-generated, geometrically-complex “walls,” because LeWitt never said the wall had to be flat. Sometimes the most exciting thing about a piece of generative art is what the instructions don’t doesn’t say. When humans interpret generative art, there are always ways to bend the rules, and this is where a lot of the fun comes in.
But conceptually, LeWitt Generator Generator is actually a sequel to a generative artwork that I made more than seven years ago. It’s a way of correcting a big mistake that I made back then.
I’ve been asking questions about how we commodify art for quite some time. This essay is about how NFTs commodify art ideas in the same way that conceptualists did in the 1960s. But back in 2014, I exhibited a generative artwork that used Sol LeWitt as a touchstone to say that the reality we’re seeing today was going to be impossible.
At that time, the internet had rendered preposterous this notion that we could sell the value of an idea. Print media still hadn’t figured out how to get people to pay for information. The music industry was (and still is) in shambles, never figuring out how to recover from file-sharing. A common refrain: INFORMATION WANTS TO BE FREE. It’s a statement which sounds very utopian, but is still crippling creative industries that really need information to be not-quite-so-free. And for an artist, that mentality is a slap in the face to the assertion that THE IDEA IS THE ART, especially if the art is something you want to sell.
So in 2014, Sol LeWitt’s ideas about value seem pretty outdated. So in February of that year, in an exhibition of computer-generated art at Angell Gallery on Ossington Avenue in Toronto, I exhibited this artwork called Sol LeWitt Generator. I took the instructions for Sol LeWitt’s wall drawing #118 and translated them into code. Then I printed that code out into a little booklet that took the form of an IKEA instruction manual and I gave it away for free at the exhibition. On the wall, instead of producing the drawing, I just wrote out the code for the program. And I let the program run and generate a bunch of high-resolution images, printed those off and sold those.
In doing so, I completely inverted LeWitt’s value system — what goes on the wall, what’s free and what’s for sale, and where the commodity form The Conceptualists had asserted that the idea itself was where an artwork’s real (artistic and financial) value was located. But 50 years later, it seemed that really wasn’t going to work out. Sadly, there was no way to commodify artwork that could be shared over the internet, so this commercial gallery exhibit was a statement of resignation, a sigh. It was an acknowledgement that the conceptualist’s vision of the idea-as-artwork was impossible. (Assuming, of course, that you cared about being able to make a living by selling your idea-as-artwork. And you should.)
I was wrong in 2014.
18 months later, Ethereum went live. 5 years after that: Art Blocks! Autoglyphs! Deafbeefs! And soon, I believe: even wilder, more conceptual artwork attached to blockchain tokens.
So I created LeWitt Generator Generator as a sort of mea culpa. I needed to re-examine those ideas. NFTs are providing a commodity form for artistic ideas and processes. An Art Blocks token is ownership of a unique, live execution of an artist-designed process.
The relationship between an artwork’s commodity form and its expressive form is particularly fascinating in the case of an Art Blocks mint, where they’re separate but symbiotic. One actually can’t exist without the other. When a collector purchases an Art Blocks piece, that transaction is a crucial part of the process that executes the finished artwork. The randomly-generated (though permanently-recorded) transaction record is the data that seeds the artwork — it’s the starting point from which the artist’s script grows into a finished image. On Art Blocks, the process of commodifying art and the process of generating art are intertwined: it’s a fantastic microcosm of the strange and exciting art world that we’re building in 2021.
Minting of LeWitt Generator Generator goes live on Art Blocks on Wed Aug 4, 2021 ⋅ 11am CDT (UTC-5)
