The rise of NFT art — part of the canon of contemporary art or a fleeting phenomenon?
Sedition was founded with the belief that everyone should have access to fine art — the creative genius of today’s contemporary artists shouldn’t be available only to those with deep pockets! The starting point of Sedition is that there are many more art lovers out there than there are billionaires. Since our beginning in 2011, the community has grown to reflect this inclusive approach. Our collector base includes gallery and museum goers, traditional art collectors, established and aspiring artists and everyone from the TikTok and digital generation to octogenarian art-lovers! People from various walks of life and with different interests spread across every continent. The landscape of contemporary art is wide — and so is our community.
There are of course still many artists working in ‘traditional’ media — brush and canvas, stone, metal and wood, or pencil and paper. There are artists creating purely conceptual pieces or works from ‘ready-made’ everyday objects, there is performance art, sound art and every imaginable form and permutation between. And now of course there’s an immense digital realm! Digital has been a part of the art landscape for a while now (think photography or video work) but we’ve really only scratched the surface of this field. We’re starting to see interactive and live artworks, generative artworks, artworks created using AI… There are fascinating works coming out of these areas and the success of several new digital immersive exhibitions points to the popularity and enduring appeal of the digital world.
Of these new developments, one that’s been hard to miss with all the newsprint and media it has generated is NFT art! This is an important development of the art world — and especially the digital domain — that is often forgotten (or even derided) by certain curators and traditionalists. This is not to say that NFTs are ignored — clearly they are not — but rather that art being created by NFT-first artists is frequently overlooked or belittled as ‘not art’. Yes, it’s true that NFT art is often different from the digital contemporary art with which traditional art lovers are familiar. However, is it any less art? On what criteria?
There is a famous quote from the Indian statesman Jawaharlal Nehru: ‘The art of a people is a true mirror of their minds’. What could be more apposite than this when looking at NFTs?
Look back at the art from any period in history. In the early 1000s for example, the Romanesque through to the Gothic eras, Christianity and the interpretation of the Bible occupied a central role in the arts — as it did in people’s minds and lives, reflecting the incumbent power structures and the mindsets of that era. Move on to the Renaissance in the 1400s and 1500s, and the focus on the wider world emerges as people begin to discover and understand their world from the explorer’s point of view rather than a solely biblical or religious stance. The Baroque era celebrated rulers, as the kings wanted to see themselves, rather than gods or beautiful landscapes, on the masterpieces. Later on, movements such as Impressionism — and their experimental (and at the time controversial) styles — were ushered in precisely at the time when the world was being upended by the industrial revolution.
With the arrival of ‘Modern Art’ — often understood as starting around 1860 through the twentieth century — things started to get slightly bizarre, as did our lives. Old values were discarded, new artforms were conceived to better reflect the changing paradigm of the modern world. Some changes were fundamental: Malevich’s Black Square is a perfect example of the birthing movement that helped push art from something that had to be representational, into the abstract. As the lives of people started to shift from the established norms of previous centuries into the unknown, so did the art they created — giving rise to numerous new movements such as surrealism, suprematism, cubism and many others — all of which dealt with our evolving experience of the world and the human condition.
Today in the field of contemporary art, we can consider works such as Tracey Emin’s My Bed — an exhibit of the artist’s bed literally soiled with blood, menstrual stains, and discarded condoms. Or Damien Hirst’s The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living — a shark presented in formaldehyde. What do these works tell us about ourselves, about our society? Perhaps now art is more concerned with the ugliness of the world, instead of its beauty? Perhaps the provocation is more important? The thoughts sparked into life upon viewing it? Which factor now comes into play? Perhaps, from the collector’s standpoint, it’s merely another historical milestone? Another marker of where and who we were, and when.
This brings us — in a very roundabout way — to NFT art. If you’re not familiar with NFT art, open OpenSea and browse it for a bit — you’ll grasp the concept fairly quickly. It’s hard to put all NFT art into one box, there’s no single theme or level of quality that you’re going to find. However, to generalize, most artworks on OpenSea are still images or GIFs, there are also often collections of them and they have different elements. They are typically quite simplistic and are frequently related to an animal, a meme, a cartoonish character or a caricature. One of the most successful and prominent collections of NFTs out there is called Bored Ape Yacht Club — these are images of 10000 unique apes that serve as membership cards to an exclusive club. Some would argue that these apes aren’t art — but why do they draw in so many people and why have they become so prominent? On the one hand the answer is easy — there are sums of money to be made from the attached cryptocurrency values! But this is simplistic — there are any number of other routes to cryptocurrency trading and speculation, and hundreds and thousands of other NFT collections! Could it be that in this day and age, with so many demands upon our attention, when ease-of-access and instant gratification are the drivers of consumerism — that NFT art is the perfect encapsulation of this? The ideal art for this moment? At Sedition, we don’t subscribe to the belief in fractured attention spans and intellectual capabilities — the work being done across all fields of human endeavor refutes this — but in an era when we see more images, videos, adverts and media of all sorts than ever before, we need to parse our time and attention carefully. Perhaps NFTs are the perfect form for this? Could it be that Bored Apes strike a chord, as people identify themselves in this way?
At Sedition we try not to be prescriptive about what is and what is not, ‘Art’. Our goal is to present the very best of the contemporary art landscape — whatever that might be! Would My Bed have been recognised as ‘Art’ by the figures of the Renaissance? Or Malevich’s Black Square? Perhaps the constraints of working with a small digital file are just the limitation of this particular art form, in the same way that the structure of a Haiku or a sonnet will focus creativity into the limitations of the form, so it is for NFTs.
All in all, NFT art is, as the name suggests, art. It’s not ‘the death of painting’ or the ‘end of traditional media’ or any of the usual hysteria drummed up for each new movement or event in the art world. It will not replace or subvert existing forms. It is, however, what is happening now. It is what is being created now. It is currently a ‘true mirror of our mind’ - some of it good, some bad and some ugly. NFT art should not be dismissed or considered apart from the contemporary landscape. It is just another form. Perhaps one day curators and art historians of the future may study and admire Bored Apes just as we do the arts of the Renaissance. Just as we do Malevich’s Black Square. Just as we do Tracey Emin’s My Bed.
