Everydays: The First 5000 Days by Mike Winklemann Beeple

Can an NFT be Art?

Non-Fungible Tokens are acting as deeds for artworks and other valuable objects (be they digital or in meatspace), but what would it mean for a token to itself be the object of aesthetic value? How do we imagine works born and living on blockchains in any meaningful sense?

Competing Definitions of Art in a Novel Medium

In grad school, I studied video games as artworks and video game players as artists performing them (like a pianist playing a composition). I tried convincing scholars who didn’t have handy definitions of art to recategorize a known human endeavour as artistic. Fast forward 15 years and I am at it again. My hope here is to talk about the definitions of art and how these might intersect with decentralized artworks and in particular, NFTs.

There are two competing definitional strategies for classing objects as art. The first is based on the object’s intrinsic properties. The second is dependent on actors with cultural capital calling it art. The former is an extremely unpopular view of art in a contemporary academic setting. The only field that actually supports the intrinsic view as far as I am aware is Analytic Aesthetic Philosophy (“AAP”).

Some scholars of AAP have proposed a disjoint definition of art, where some subsets of criteria are sufficient (but not necessary) for an object to be art. One sufficient set of criteria (that I would call the “Creativity Set”) that is widely accepted, even if it is not explicitly acknowledged is the following:

1. Unique
2. Valuable (e.g. shares relevant ideas)
3. Produced without a recipe (Or produced with what Berys Gaut calls Flair)

Without the third criterion, you end up with “paint by numbers” or other crafts, which look like art minus the risk of failure.

The alternative definition of art is called the Institutional Definition of Art (“IDA”). Essentially, an institution (like a museum, university, gallery, private collection, etc.) can transfer its cultural capital (a.k.a. street cred) into an object and as such that object becomes art. Marcel Duchamps’ Fountain is an excellent critique|example of the IDA. He placed a urinal that he did not make, signed by someone else’s name, in a gallery and called it art by virtue of the fact that it was in a gallery. Piero Manzoni canned his feces and did something similar decades later. These artists were famous for pointing out our discomfort with and acceptance of the IDA. However, these examples do not refute the first premise, as their works are actually unique, valuable (in the sense that they propose an interesting idea), and generated with flair (as in there was no clear method being deployed to create these objects).

Some AAPs believe their disjoint definition is clearly superior because the art institutions themselves need criteria to determine what they will imbue with aesthetic value. Otherwise it would be turtles all the way down.

The IDA folks believe that institutions have no such clear criteria and instead select based on political pressures, object availability, social networks, imbalances in cultural capital, etc.

Beeple’s 5000 Days as Example

Beeple’s 69m$ sale of Everydays: The First 5000 Days (“5000 Days”) became an artwork not because it was unique, valuable or produced without a recipe, but because sufficient political pressures were placed on Christie’s to include it in its auction. The IDA implies that since Christie’s is such an important art institution the Beeple becomes art by default.

An AAP might still reject the Beeple as an artwork under the Creativity Set. However, because the definition is disjoint, meaning the criteria are not necessary (only sufficient), the AAP will not be able to claim that it isn’t art.

In either case, 5000 Days is not an NFT, it is a work which has a set of humans agreeing that the ownership of that work is determined by the controller of a specific private key. In other words, the deed which manages 5000 Days is an NFT, but is not itself the locus of aesthetic value. I believe this element is often confused because 5000 Days was born digital as a file on a hard drive somewhere and has since be decentralized its in replication. But let me reiterate, the file is not itself an NFT and that file itself does not live on a blockchain in any meaningful sense.

What Will NFT Art Look Like?

From here, we already know that born digital objects like the infamous Beeple can be art under the IDA while perhaps failing to meet the Creativity Set of the AAP. However, my hunch is that some of the most valuable works in the world tend to also meet AAP’s definition.

Excitingly, the opportunity for Uniqueness and Flair with NFTs is quite high because these are new technologies. Cinema was able to stop remediating theatre and create novel experiences by the early 20th century as directors discovered medium-specific properties of film and used these to novel and valuable effects. 5000 Days does not leverage the properties of NFTs to bolster its aesthetic relevance, rather the NFT aspect seems to heighten its media-archaeological value. For instance, the first photograph might be interesting or valuable, but not because it is a work of art.

To my mind, the most interesting NFT artworks will leverage the trustless, permanent-yet-changeable, decentralized nature of the blockchain to produce effects that are themselves outside contemporary possibilities for standard artworks. The real value thesis should seek not only a Beeple that can pressure Christies to include it into the art canon, but something more medium-specific.

So then what should we look for? Unfortunately, if there were a recipe then it likely wouldn’t produce objects with Flair and likely would meet the creativity set, so it is actually hard to say. Going on a hunch, I would try to find:

1. Works with many artists (cinema and theatre have many artists, so this is not too new, unless the number is remarkably high)
2. Works that mutate while also remaining immutable (like a well-kept blockchain).
3. Works that leverage mechanism design (video games do this already, you’ll want to see financial incentives for something really different here)
4. Works that bring an actually novel idea about in a way that would be extremely hard in another medium

What to avoid? Again, nothing hard and fast, but there are some red herrings.

1. Pretty works (think of the difference between craft/design and art)
2. Works related to cyberpunk-fantasy-gothic and other geek cultures that feed off providing fan service to early cypher-punks
3. Works you understand (artists are generally having really difficult conversations about topics that are just too hard to simply wade into… these are professional thinker/makers who are experts in a field you likely do not grok)