Are Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs) the new Art?
Maybe celebrity buyers are on to something
Lately there are NFT collections that have made huge splashes: think Eminem and Jimmy Fallon buying Bored Ape Yacht Club (BAYC) NFTs for hundreds of thousands of dollars. When I first saw them, the apes looked like cartoons. Some were slightly humorous or cute- but overall, not that interesting to me. But these and other NFT collections like CryptoPunks have turned into a major phenomenon. It made me wonder how much of this is about art and how much is about finance. There’s a lot of crypto and other wealth out there chasing ways to store value.
Some people say that NFTs are commercial garbage. Some say they are art, even if they were generated by a computer. What I didn’t understand when I first saw NFTs like CryptoPunks and BAYC was that many buyers are also seeking a community they can join. It’s social. The ownership of the NFT is an entry to a community of real people with the same interest- at least in the same NFT set.
I think of Non-Fungible art tokens as the pop culture side of cryptocurrency. But as it has always been with all art, beauty is in the eye of the beholder.
What is different these days is there are artists, programmers and teams of people minting 5000 or 10,000 series NFTs that are computer generated. They use elements that can be hand or digitally drawn- but the computer then rolls the dice for each iteration. Think Mr. Potato Head- the artist comes up with all the elements, features, and items that may be held by the character- and the computer shakes them all up and outputs a digital picture. Add a smart contract and crypto gas and you have an NFT. Some argue that this is computer-made art and not worthwhile. Others say this may be another form of art that may even have an added dimension.
The biggest breakthrough that NFTs have brought is that they allow registration of art on a blockchain- usually Ethereum. This makes for portable digital art that usually has certain permissions or ownership qualities. All transactions are recorded on the equivalent of a giant ledger book (or blockchain) in the world wide web sky. It’s pretty neat: you can type in a wallet address and search the Ethereum blockchain for all its transactions. Same with Polygon. So you could go to Opensea or another NFT exchange and check the ownership of an NFT you like by inputting the owner’s wallet number and cross referencing the purchase transaction. You could also check your own wallet to find all your own transactions on the blockchain any time.
In the old days, and even today, there are huge fights over physical art because it’s hard to trace the chain of ownership — called “provenance.” Problems like thefts or title issues can make a piece of art unsaleable. For example, an owner in the chain of title might have bought from a gallery owner or family member with no authority to sell. A piece of art may have liens on it due to undisclosed loans. Other art may have ownership claims by more than one person.
The blockchain solves the provenance problem by i.d.-tagging the art and identifying the owner, or the type of ownership a buyer has agreed to through a smart contract. On the lower rungs of social cool, possessing an NFT of art or music before it’s recognized as cool by others can provide identifiable street cred. On the highest level of finance, an NFT can show proof of ownership of a single original work of art.
There are a lot of artists who hate NFTs because it’s easy to steal a clip of their art for a collage that becomes part of a NFT. The original work may be a one of a kind that has been sold already to someone else- and it understandably chafes artists to see their own work continue to make money for someone else who didn’t even purchase it. Others don’t like the commercialization of art to enrich venture capitalists and bitcoin bros. Many artists are not convinced NFTs are the way to go.
There also are a lot of gamers who hate the idea of NFTs. In many digital games, users create an avatar that they use to go on quests, win battles, and gain loot. No money changes hands in the game- it’s all Monopoly money. The money in the game is a way of charting progress and keeping score. But it never becomes necessary to use real money to raise game skill. Some gamers are worried that turning avatars into expensive NFTs and needing real world money to finance life inside a game will be costly and take away from the fun of the game. On the other hand, there are gamers who would have liked to sell all their game possessions on the way out- but in a no money game, there’s no real money to be had. These gamers want the hours they spend in the game to convert to real money.
But let’s go back to the art. One of the very pop-type NFT collections that intrigued me recently was the Monas. And quick disclaimer on this, I own a couple but I’m not selling. The Monas look like collages and reference a crazy mix up of pop leaning heavily to crypto pop images- including some of the NFT collections that have taken off, as well as clips from games and the metaverse, and clips from pop and crypto icons like Elon Musk and Vitalik Buterin. They were all created from discrete pieces of art or screen shots mixed up by a computer. But there’s something about them that I find compelling in how the images come together.
I recently started following Jim Dee who is a programmer, businessman, artist and writer on Medium. His NFTuxedo Cats are absolutely beautiful. Something about them calls Gustav Klimt to my mind.
It made me wonder if Klimt would have become a big name in NFT creation of large computer generated sets. You can almost see Adele Bloch-Bauer with a different head, a different necklace, different hands, different backgrounds- and it still working as a beautiful image- even if the computer made the final “choices” of the elements. Same with Klimt’s 1901 Beethoven Frieze- I mean it even has an ape in it!
I think these large, generated set NFTs are interesting as an idea. I also find some of them compelling, thoughtful, and beautiful. I think that makes them art, even if a computer assisted in putting them together.
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