Art in the age of non-fungible reproduction
Everyone is talking about Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs), and often what they say isn’t very nice.
The people selling them are ‘crypto-grifters’ according to blockchain expert David Gerard, speaking to the BBC. In the same article we find that those investing are ‘mugs’, according to former Christie’s auctioneer Charles Allsopp. Christie’s, incidentally, held the first digital-only art auction at the start of March, with Beeple’s catalogue of work selling for $69m. Presumably Allsopp meant mug in its most fawning sense.
NFTs are a crypto-token that let you (sort of) ‘own’ a digital artwork or artefact. They’re non-fungible, because if you own it, no one else does. In this way, they allow value to be attached to digital media.
Beyond the extraordinary sums some NFTs are selling for, there are two main criticisms of them. The first is that digital artefacts — whether artwork or something else, like a Jack Dorsey tweet — aren’t real art. The second is that because anything digital can be easily reproduced, NFTs are a con.
Personally, I’m not going to be buying any NFTs any time soon. But I do think those criticisms are thin.
Firstly, as technology develops, culture encompasses more stuff. Centuries ago, cultural objects and artefacts were exclusively physical objects — paintings or drawings on stone or canvas, statues or idols hewn from rock or plaster, words imprinted on paper or etched on wood, among myriad other items.
As photography and then cinema developed, new cultural objects emerged — with different types and levels of significance to different audiences. In our modern age, digital artworks, videos and even social media comments form part of our collective culture. If people say they have value, they have value.
The second charge against NFTs is that they are easily reproduced. The video by Beeple which sold for $6.6m can be downloaded, for free, by anyone. For some, this amounts to nothing short of a con: NFTs are a fraud, a grift, and if you buy one, you’re a mug.
At $6.6m, maybe. But people fly across the world to Paris and pay a €17 entrance fee to see the Mona Lisa in the Louvre (in an example of supreme irony, thanks to the pandemic, the Louvre is currently only open for virtual tours).
That painting is so famous you don’t even need a digital replica to picture it, but here is one, free of charge, anyway.
In Florence, tourists queue for the Galleria Accademia, and pay €12 to see Michelangelo’s David — despite an identical replica standing in public view in Piazza della Signoria less than a mile away. Prefer literature to sculpture? Take your pick of first editions worth thousands, and paperbacks worth pennies — each with the same words in the same order.
The difference, clearly, is that digital artworks are always digital: Beeple’s video looks the same on the NFT owner’s screen as it does on yours. When you look at the statue of David in Galleria Accademia you’re looking at the marble sculpture that Michelangelo himself spent more than two years carving, rather than a replica made hundreds of years after he died.
But the dilution is the same: when art is reproduced, it loses something. Surely that is as true of digital art as it is of physical works?
Walter Benjamin’s 1935 essay, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, explores the relationship between physical art and technology. According to Benjamin:
“Even the most perfect reproduction of a work of art is lacking in one element: its presence in time and space, its unique existence at the place where it happens to be… [t]he presence of the original is the prerequisite to the concept of authenticity.”
Benjamin is writing decades before the advent of this kind of digital technology, but his point about the uniqueness — and unimpeachable authenticity of originals — holds true. He goes on to define that uniqueness as a work’s ‘aura’, arguing:
“…that which withers in the age of mechanical reproduction is the aura of the work of art… [b]y making many reproductions it substitutes a plurality of copies for a unique existence.”
What else are NFTs but an attempt to reclaim and own that ‘aura’ in a digital world?
It seems likely that NFTs are in a bubble right now — that the multi-million dollar purchases will prove the exception rather than the rule, and maybe those that have spent big will come to regret it.
But if it is true that digital art is art (even if it can be reproduced with the click of a keypad) then a market for ownership will prevail. Anywhere you look, scarcity, exclusivity and providence come with price tags. NFTs provide that, even when art is subject to digital reproduction.
This piece first appeared on Trajectory Online, an insight and futures resource. For more information, visit https://trajectorypartnership.com/subscribe-to-trajectory/
