The end of the beginning of NFT art
The initial hype around NFT art may be over, but what do they mean for the art world?
Back from Miami Art Basel and part-way through my write up, I thought it was relevant to resurface an article I wrote for Digital Frontier a while back on the beginnings of NFT Art, based on the book “On NFTs” edited by artist Robert Alice. You can find the original article here.
While NFTs have, for the moment, been relegated by the wider Art industry to an eye roll and a chuckled statement on a crazy time that’s unlikely to be repeated, the NFT hype of 2021 continues to be a pivotal moment for digital art. Bringing the sale and purchase of artwork firmly into the realm of online culture, NFTs cut to the heart of crypto’s potential, breaking down the institutional structure of the art world and allowing access to anyone who wanted to create or buy artwork. All this, while providing a mechanism for proving the authenticity and ownership of digital work.
I’ll go into it a bit more in my weekend essay, but at this year’s Art Basel, we got another glimpse of that potential for breaking barriers. Images of Beeple’s tech-mogul-headed robotic dogs flooded social media, met with reactions of both disgust and awe. The robots awkwardly shuffled around their glass enclosure in the centre of Miami Basel’s Zero 10 exhibition area “pooping” paper versions of NFTs that were later given to an unsuspecting onlooker to take home and claim online.
While the approach wasn’t perfect, (the onlooker still had to get to Miami, into the Art Basel festival floor and be selected to take one home) in a gatekept world where collectors can spend millions of dollars on a single artwork, the fact that a lucky bystander could be rewarded for simply witnessing an artwork stood in stark contrast. Some of the NFTs have since sold for tens of thousands of dollars.
Taking it back a bit, the essay below goes into the origins of the NFT movement, highlighting the experimentation that happened around the first NFT boom and why we may only have seen the end of the beginning of these cryptographic artworks.
Part wonder, part incredulity greeted the NFT boom of 2021-2022, as the monetary value of what appeared, for most people, to be simple, replicable jpegs, reached extraordinary highs.
For parts of the art world, however, the popularisation of NFTs was more than a moment of random virality. It was the product of an evolving community in the art world, already decades old, that had become increasingly disillusioned by the traditional art market’s flaws: its barriers to all but a few lucky and well-connected artists; the valuation decisions made by a tiny group of leaders and institutions; and the age-old question of what art actually means for the wider community.
NFTs offered the promise of simultaneously bypassing the gatekeepers to the art world’s elitist structure and allowing for decentralised consensus creation that was directly linked to an artwork’s value. They were built on an infrastructure that challenged the hierarchy and organisation of traditional institutions and could at the same time be used to create algorithmic and participatory pieces.
But now, still reeling from their burst hype bubble that has seen the prices of bluechip collections tumble more than 80% from their highs even as the broader crypto market set fresh records, NFTs are caught in an identity crisis. While early on, NFTs rejected the traditional figures of the art sector, artists have begun turning to them for auctions, promotion and exhibitions. Digital assets can be bought for very little, opening out collection and participation in art to the masses, yet some of the most famous creators release new series with price tags only the super-rich can afford. NFTs were also meant to ensure royalties for their original creators, coding returns into their “immutable” framework. However this feature was last year dropped by OpenSea, one of the largest NFT marketplaces in the industry in response to the reduced fees offered by their main competitor, Blur.
Christie’s $69 million auction of “Everydays: the first 5,000 days” by artist Mike Winkelmann, aka Beeple, in early 2021 is often seen as both the end of early NFT creation and the birth of the global frenzy that brought the nascent industry’s contradictions into the spotlight.
While NFTs carry a promise of flattening the traditional structure of art sale and collection, reality morphed the NFT sector’s inclusive access into “survival of the fittest” driven by a rat race of hype-mongers and centralised economies. Now, those who support the medium are left to work out what the NFT fever dream actually meant for the art world.
Before there were NFTs there was computer art
Building on contemporary artwork such as Marcel Duchamp’s “Monte Carlo Bonds”, and Andy Warhol’s “Dollar Bills”, NFTs embody the idea of art as currency. Their goal of democratising the art world has become enmeshed with their tradability.
Sol LeWitt, a pioneer in the conceptual art movement that emerged in the 1960’s, is often linked to NFT projects for his works that focused on an artwork’s instructions, rather than the artwork itself, and his underlying belief that artists are mainly producers of ideas. Under that lens, the first instances of the crypto art that would become NFTs are seen in the early days of blockchain.
Nestled into the code of the nascent infrastructure, Bitcoin transactions acted as the carriers of political statements, that in themselves could be considered a form of contemporary art. In block zero of Bitcoin, pseudonymous founder Satoshi Nakamoto hardcoded a headline from The Times referencing the fallout of the 2008 financial crisis and linking to the front cover of the British newspaper. Later on, in-code tributes and artistic currencies were developed. Rhea Myers’s “MYSOUL” (2014) which saw Myers split her “soul” into 100 tokens on Counterparty and Dogecoin, and Sarah Meyohas’s “Bitchcoin” (2015), which was the first instance of coins being backed by the artist’s photographic work, are examples of artists experimenting with the blockchain to develop artistic concepts that would be sold on-chain.
The start of speculation
From 2014, there was a glimpse of what NFTs would become, as celebrated artist Kevin McCoy, who had already installed digital artworks in New York’s Museum of Modern Art, took to blockchain to authenticate his new series, “Quantum”. As a digital artist he had been caught in the replicability of his work, appealing to only the most adventurous of collectors and galleries. For him, blockchain allowed the work to be both shared and owned, with immutable proof of the original work’s authenticity.
“Quantum” was a watershed moment for NFTs, a signpost to what the technology could bring to the art world. In “On NFTs”, a new book of reflections by artists on the movement published by Taschen this month, contributors write how NFTs gave smart contracts a “visible purpose beyond cryptocurrencies”, that served as a building block for the web3 space.
The fact that NFTs are speculative assets and inherently financialised has never seemed to dissuade the sector’s bannermen. In fact, many of the artists invited to contribute to “On NFTs” see it as representative of contemporary art’s evolution. NFTs replace traditional art’s unique “aura”, the idea that an original artwork cannot be communicated through replication, with “buzz” that relies on reproducibility.
“Retweets are consensus, likes are confidence. Clout is attention. And yet this is no panacea, for the aura of digital art is now challenged not by the virality of reproduction, but by the intimacy of price,” writes the artist Robert Alice, who edited the book.
A quick buck or a democratic market?
For many artists involved in the NFT movement today, the form reflects the inherently shareable nature of digital art. A result of experimentation with ownership and exchange of artwork, they turn the artworks themselves into a tool for value creation. In this way, NFTs’ financialisation seems to play a large part in how they contribute to the art sector as a whole.
And there’s a practical consideration here too. Artists, not known for their stable income streams, have an interest in the technology’s ability to fund their creative practice, driving creator empowerment and ownership “forever”.
“Of course, no one wants people to just flip work and make money,” Robert Alice told Digital Frontier in a recent interview. “It’s not useful or healthy, but it’s just symptomatic of a very democratic market where the whole point is to not bar people.”
But for others, despite finance playing a large part, the technology has other meanings. A few see it as a record of history, “the way an alien race will learn about us a million years into the future,” writes artist Krista Kim. Some focus on the tech, seated in cryptography, and how it can help them create new artwork. But for many, its promise lies in NFTs’ ability to open the art market to more creators and to a wider audience.
Democratisation as a playground
The engagement of this audience has manifested in a number of ways within the NFT art world. Despite NFT trade being concentrated on only a few platforms such as OpenSea and Blur, the platforms’ integration into the internet allowed for access and uploads from all over the world, casting a wider net for acceptance and creation. Little known artists in nations far from the art world’s traditional capitals in Europe and the US quickly became artistic celebrities despite being previously the brunt of gallerists’ ridicule.
Nigerian artist Prince Jacon Osinachi Igwe is self-taught, using Microsoft Word on computers in internet cafes to create his digital artworks. In an essay about Osinachi featured in “On NFTs”, ClubNFT CEO Jason Bailey and Alex Estorick, editor of Right Click Save magazine, say the artist had “statistically speaking, almost zero chance of achieving success.” Sure enough, when he approached gallerists in New York and London, he was ridiculed and ignored.
However, through creating NFTs of his artwork and uploading them to OpenSea, Osinachi could present his work to a wider market. The aesthetics and themes of his artwork, often focused on marginalised figures in Nigeria engaging in everyday activities, resonated with people and he quickly found a group of collectors.
“Now, I’m able to cut out this person who doesn’t believe in my art, who is capable of preventing my art from even reaching the collectors,” said Osinachi in an interview with Right Click Save. “Middlemen like this can put artists down. But through the NFT space, I’ve been able to circumvent these middlemen and put my art out there. And now these middlemen are the ones coming to me asking to collaborate.”
How consensus shapes aesthetics
The open, public network of NFTs has been central to a lot of work in the space. For the influential artist Pak, it became the subject and the medium of the piece “Merge”, which pulled on the collective involvement of its audience. Pak minted 30,000 Mass tokens, which were available for sale for only 48 hours. Collectors could buy one token per wallet. Any additional tokens bought by the same address would merge into the original to create a new, dynamic artwork.
Pak played with the infrastructure of smart contracts and their relationship with human behaviour. Using the public ledger of the Ethereum blockchain as a medium, all actions of ownership and merging can be tracked and viewed, contributing to the long-term evolution of the artwork.
“‘Merge’ is a multifaceted smart contract–based work using carefully constructed rules relating to time, human behaviour, aesthetics, price. All this is filtered through the relationship between the fragment and the whole, the node and the network,” writes Rhea Myers, a blockchain artist and coder, in “On NFTs”.
The nature of NFTs has led to aesthetics based on market-led consensus (for example meme-centred NFTs) and blockchain-led outcomes (like “Merge” and other code-led pieces) instead of traditional standards of artistic beauty. Grown out of cypherpunk mailing lists and gamer chat rooms, the consensus on aesthetic value is, at times, worlds apart from traditional art’s gatekeepers.
The blockchain has given birth to new forms of collective ownership and organisation, through the creation of collector Decentralised Autonomous Organisations (DAOs). Touted as a wider-reaching answer to traditional art funding, the decentralised nature of a collector DAO creates a “hive mind”, according to Aaron Wright and Serena Tabacchi, writing in “On NFTs”. These structures, they argue, can pull together a collection of diverse backgrounds and experiences to minimise blind spots on the NFT art space.
A new type of gatekeeper
But the NFT sector also hasn’t remained the inclusive space it was. NFT marketplaces like SuperRare, once open to all, have started restricting artists’ access. Other platforms, once only policed for spam and authenticity, have implemented “invite only” policies and “allow lists”.
In the case of SuperRare, centralisation of the platform’s curation is offset only by “community curation games”, undertaken by participants in the SuperRare DAO. Participants can compete to become one of ten curators of a “space” on the platform, giving them an opportunity to surface artists into the forefront of the ecosystem.
This slightly-less-decentralised approach has its advantages. Artists are often lost in the primordial soup of fully open platforms, relying heavily on web2 solutions like Instagram to increase their visibility. Tighter curation also seems to positively impact sales on the platforms, increasing the average sales price of artworks. But curated platforms could be seen as a departure from the open-for-all-anywhere promise of NFTs.
Building onwards
While it’s uncertain if NFT artworks will ever regain the “buzz” seen at its hyped-up 2021 highs, the days of flipping Bored Apes and Crypto Punks may have given way to a new era.
Digital art that has been solidifying itself as a respected medium in art circles since the 60s, now has an immutable way to prove a work’s authenticity, while remaining true to its digital roots. The integration of artwork onto a code-dependent blockchain allows for new ways of creating art, directly reflecting internet interaction, and now, digital art’s replicability could become its strength, allowing for a network of likes, shares and retweets to fuel it and its artist’s economic success.
While the open access to the art market promised by early platforms has been restricted by increased curation, the NFT space remains more open than the traditional art world. Gatekeepers, while not eradicated, have increased in number, and the pool of artists that can be accepted has grown far beyond the traditional art centres.
The market still shows contradictions, but those who work within the NFT art space are hopeful for what it could be in the future.
“On NFTs” ends with an essay on building, written by María Paula Fernández, co-founder of curation protocol JPG, NFT artist Simon Denny and crypto-art writer Adina Glickstein. The chapter pulls on the idea that, in web3, “critique often takes shape in creation.” The infrastructure for NFTs was built through open-source collaboration between artists and technologists, write the authors, and therefore, its future can only be made with ongoing collaboration to fix the weaknesses of the space.
I think art is art, NFTs are just proof of something and there is no term like NFT ART.
Interesting. The on-chain art movement may only be starting.