A couple of years ago I ran across an intriguing notion to combine the blockchain with art, and now it appears someone has gone, done it – and financial magic is happening:
On Thursday, a digital collage of hundreds of weird, brightly colored images made by a South Carolina artist known as Beeple sold at the prestigious Christie’s auction for $69.3 million. The staggering price is the third highest ever for a work by a living artist, second only to pieces sold by art-world giants Jeff Koons and David Hockney.
But unlike Koons’s balloon dog sculptures and Hockney’s acrylic paintings, the collage, known as “Everydays: The First 5000 Days,” is entirely digital. In effect, the buyer — a blockchain investor who goes only by the name of MetaKovan — bought a file that is not very different from the photo posted at the top of this article.
What sets it apart, though, is that this specific file is an NFT, or non-fungible token. Using the same principles behind cryptocurrencies such as bitcoin, NFTs allow people to claim ownership over specific digital files, be they songs, videos or static images. Beeple, whose real name is Mike Winkelmann, is the latest beneficiary of a rush into NFTs that’s a side effect of the fast-growing interest in digital currencies and the technology behind them. [WaPo]
But it’s a bit of a fudge:
An NFT is a type of digital crypto asset. They represent a specific version of any digital file — whether it’s a song, a video game or a simple image. Using the same technology that bitcoin uses, people can “mint” NFTs, creating a record of ownership that’s spread across thousands of computers around the world that cannot be changed by anyone except the owner. It’s a way of turning a digital file into something that can be bought and sold like a physical object.
NFTs are not tangible — you can’t hold them or touch them (unless, of course, you decided to print a copy of one, like you might print out an art image). The knowledge in the owner’s mind that they own the original or “real” version of the digital file is what makes them valuable.
That is, the analogy between digital and tangible art breaks down when it comes to copies. The last paragraph suggests the art isn’t encrypted, which means it can still be copied and manipulated by anyone who can get a copy of it in an agreeable format in the first place.
Not that an original Pollock, say, cannot be copied – but the permission of the owner is required, not optional, in order to make, distribute, and even manipulate a copy. This real-world requirement, sloppy and possibly ill-defined as it is, makes the Pollock materially different from the Beeple, at least until the real-world copy is perfect.
On computers, it’s almost more difficult to do a bad copy than a good copy, at least of a static artwork. (A non-static artwork might be a visual representation of a neural network implementing some sort of machine learning task.)
It’s also worth noting that since this was sold using bitcoin as the exchange currency, the exact price fluctuates in relation to dollars and other tangible currencies – which, given recent movements, could means it’s worth twice as much a month from now – or half. And while inflation caused by printing more money bitcoin won’t be happening, fluctuations caused by investors trying to cash in on bitcoin movements does make it a little harder to assign a real value to Beeple’s work.
But assigning value to art is always a chancy business.
Perhaps most interesting is a quote I grabbed from two years ago from Oliver Roeder of FiveThirtyEight, which I’ll repeat here:
A new order is emerging in the art world. But will it be any different than the old one? People like [John] Zettler make me think not. He and Rare Art Labs may be handling a new type of art, but what they’re doing with it is nothing new; in fact, it’s exactly what the critic Hughes warned us against: the fetishization of art’s prices and the emptying of its higher virtues. As a result, the relationship between art and the blockchain, which seems symbiotic for the moment, could soon become parasitic. Artists can only avoid the art establishment’s capitalistic maw for so long.
Is that what’s happening here? Last year, Beatriz Helena Ramos addressed the issue of crypto art’s economics for SuperRare:
The crypto art ecosystem defines success by sales, the assumption being that the more money that goes to artists, the better. Milestones are measured by how much collectors spend. Every time an artwork gets a high price or sells immediately, everybody celebrates it. I understand the initial need to attract collectors and prove the market. In this sense, SuperRare’s million-dollar milestone is indeed a remarkable achievement. One million dollars went to artists and that is a wonderful thing. SuperRare’s well-deserved success brings validation to the entire ecosystem.
By understanding the system we can tweak its design to make it more equitable. It has become clear to me that as long as we reproduce traditional economic models, no amount of technical innovation (NFTs or DAOs) will yield any new results.
At its core, blockchain is about economics, but excepting experiments by Simon De La Rouviere, DADA, and a few others, there has been little experimentation in terms of new economic incentives. Instead, there has been an intentional effort to attract traders and speculative collectors.
Ramos is a revolutionary, but whether her revolution will succeed is an open question. But it appears she’d agree with Roeder – blockchain is not yet being used to create revolutionary new systems, only to implement the old system on computers.
But whether that’s acceptable to Ramos isn’t really the issue – that’s up to the crypto art community as a collective.
