NFTs — the cultural reckoning beyond the technology
This is a guest post by Roea Mortaki, Operations Manager at Chorus One, a staking provider supporting NEAR and other Proof-of-Stake blockchains.
If you have read Emily Ratajkowski’s essay published last September in The Cut, you know all about her kafkaesque experience trying to regain ownership over her own image — both literally and figuratively. If you haven’t read it yet, I can’t urge you enough to do so.
In the article, she first goes over her incidental discovery back in 2014 that american painter and photographer Richard Prince, had taken one of her Instagram pictures he had previously commented on (“Were you built in a science lab by teenage boys?”), a nude, printed it on a canvas and exposed it at the Gagosian gallery without her permission, or even knowledge. She tried to buy the piece — priced at around $ 90,000 at the time — but a Gagosian gallerist had already bought it for himself.
As it turned out, Richard Prince had made a second painting of her, featuring a photo from her first collaboration with Sports Illustrated. That one was still available for her to purchase at $81,000, despite having only been paid $150 for the photo shoot, then $2,000 when the magazine came out.
She managed to procure it along with her boyfriend at the time, splitting the cost with him, then bought back his share of the painting when they broke up a couple years later. A few weeks later, she realized that she hadn’t collected the smaller “study” that the studio had gifted to her when she and her ex bought the painting; after a few email exchanges, her ex made it clear that she had to pay him an extra $10,000 for it — the study they received for free, as a gift to her.
She then goes on to describe her collaboration with American photographer Jonathan Leder when she was only 21, a gut-wrenching photoshoot where he took hundreds of photos of her, before sexually assaulting her. Of the hundreds of pictures taken, Leder only made a handful available to her, never disclosing the rest of it; until a few years later — Ratajkowski had acquired a great amount of notoriety by then — when he released a book ($80 a copy) collecting the photos he took of her, without her knowledge, consent, or any form of financial compensation.
In addition to being a disarming display of candor and self awareness, Ratajkowski’s essay raises intelligent and thought provoking questions about who actually owns the picture of someone. But beyond that, and more interestingly, it sheds light on an organized system that allows an entire industry — from photographers to gallerists, agents and book publishers — to get artistic recognition, visibility and financial traction off of womens’ images, yet stripping them of all agency and denying them a fair compensation for it. Ratajkowski’s recounting of the events is an eye-opening case study of a male dominated circuit that excludes the very own people whose bodies and images are central to its raison d’être.
Now fast forward to a few weeks ago, when Ratajkowski announced the sale of a NFT titled “Buying Myself Back: A Model for Redistribution”. The NFT features her, photographed in her apartment standing in front of the now infamous Richard Prince painting, in a playful and clever mise en abyme. The NFT, auctioned at Christie’s on May 14th, sold for $175,000.
But first things first, what’s an NFT ?
NFT stands for Non-Fungible Token. Fungibility is the ability of a good or asset to be interchanged with other individual goods or assets of the same type; if I trade you one dollar for another dollar — or one ETH for another ETH — then you’ll have the exact same asset. Non-Fungible Tokens on the other hand are completely unique assets; trade one NFT for another and you’ll have a totally different asset. It is also worth mentioning that as they are supported by blockchain (most NFTs are supported by the Ethereum blockchain, although other chains can in theory put into effect their own version of NFTs), their ownership can be tracked very accurately.
NFTs can technically be any digital file like a picture or a video, but they have been making most of the headlines recently after artists and celebrities started using them as an artistic medium. Beeple, Snoop Dogg, or Jack Dorsey, among others, minted their own NFTs — with a colossal payoff.
It can be tempting to brush off Ratajkowski releasing her NFT as the cynical embrace of a lucrative market trend — and maybe it is. But in light of her struggles — and those of countless other women on the internet and in real life — with keeping rights over her own image and being fairly compensated for it, her NFT sale sends a powerful message. As she put it on Twitter, “the digital terrain should be a place where women can share their likeness as they choose, controlling the usage of their image and receiving whatever potential capital attached. Instead, the internet has more frequently served as a space where others exploit and distribute image”.
Selling an NFT also means that every time it will be exchanged in the future, she will receive a cut, and be rightfully compensated for the usage and distribution of her image. This entire act can be read as leveraging technology to shift the power imbalance and transform from being object to subject of an artistic piece.
We are all familiar with the power of blockchain technology to disrupt finance, security, forecasting or even voting, but what if it also carries the potential to make the internet a safer, fairer place for women? One can hope that this is the first step towards a cultural and technological shift for women’s self determination, financial agency, and online safety.
