NFTs, New Art Form, or the Game of Fame？
Walter Benjamin said: “Possession is the altogether deepest relationship one can possibly have to things.”
During the Winter Olympics, WeChat launched hundreds of digital snowflake prints created by different artists. As long as you complete some specific tasks on the platform, you can get a limited-edition digital snowflake with a unique number belonging to this work — an Ordinary people do own a work of art. Look, the unattainable paintings in the art gallery can be easily owned in digital form, downloaded to the mobile computer, and decorated on your desktop or circle of friends.
If you’re willing to spend some money, you can buy Winter Olympics NFTs on the NFTonShow platform powered by the BSV blockchain.
What is NFT?
Go back one year, in March 2021, when artist Mike Winkelman’s “Every Day: The First 5000 Days” sold for $69.35 million at Christie’s. The sale also catapulted the artist to fame, making him the third-highest-selling living contemporary artist after Jeff Koons and David Hockney.
Compared with the sky-high turnover of this work, what makes this transaction out of the circle is a new concept of art that follows: NFT, that is, non-fungible tokens, and NFT art is also called encrypted art. When a trend with an obscure definition is sweeping towards us, can we still maintain rational thinking and understand its underlying logic? What is crypto art? Will it become the next outlet of art? Or is this just a “new concept” game of capital seeking profit?
Art Ownership History No Longer Mystery
Successful auction houses and galleries often serve as facilitators while also introducing new concepts to collectors and the public. For example, in this encrypted art, when Christie’s promoted the concept of NFT, it emphasized its three major characteristics, namely “Scarcity, Authenticity and History of ownership”.
NFT means that artists and collectors can choose to use the same original work to generate a limited number of copies, just like the number on many book tickets, which will record the total number of works in the batch and the sequence of a certain work. Unlike the library book, the generation and transaction records of each artwork of encrypted art are stored on the blockchain, that is, people have the right to check the quantity and ownership of a certain work to ensure that the purchased authenticity of the work.
Likewise, because the artwork will be recorded on the blockchain, all relevant information about the artwork can be consulted, such as the artwork’s metadata, ownership history, blockchain address, and more. Every time a piece of art changes hands, and the blockchain address of the wallet that once owned the work will be recorded, so the “ownership” of the work of art will also be completely recorded and cannot be tampered with.
The reason why it cannot be tampered with is due to the decentralization of the blockchain, that is, there is no central server to store all the data, instead, each individual participating in the blockchain records and inherits the overall information.
In the long river of human history, the difficulty of preserving the reciprocating context of a work of art is unimaginable for people living in peaceful times. Due to wars, turmoil, plunder, natural disasters and other reasons, the ownership history of a piece of art often appears blank in stages, or is precarious and silent.
A clear history of ownership has been an amplified trait when many institutions promote crypto art. In itself, we may have fallen into a paradox. On the one hand, we pin our hopes on the code, expecting technology to solve the problem of trust, so that all history cannot be tampered with; on the other hand, we cannot fully trust technology. Because behind the technology, humans are still operating.
When “possession” is no longer “exclusive”
For many contemporary collectors, some people put works at home and indulge in the aesthetic experience of its cleansing, for fear that this momentary private pleasure will be taken away by others; some people gradually build private museums or lend their own Collections, sharing their “possession” with others.
In essence, crypto art is also similar to sharing your own collection with others. Therefore, when an NFT work is purchased, it does not indicate that the buyer has the exclusive copyright of the work. Conversely, these sold works can often be found online in high-quality images.
As a new artistic concept, NFT cannot be concluded yet. Throughout the development of art history, many artistic concepts may be dormant at the moment, but they are still being studied and given new era concepts a hundred years later. Although some art concepts are popular, they actually need more content to fill the poverty of its inception.
