The rise of NFTs signals that it’s a critical time to discuss how we see value in art
Written by Bonni Rambatan
Bonni Rambatan is a philosopher, writer and visual artist. Their latest book Event Horizon: Sexuality, Politics, Online Culture, and the Limits of Capitalism, co-written with Jacob Johanssen, is published by Zer0 Books and will be out in January 2022.
If you are involved in any way in the art world in 2021, chances are you’ve heard of NFTs. Curiously, you would have heard it in either one of two ways. Some will tell you it’s the future of art, full of rosy futures, opportunities, empowerment, and everything good under the sun. Yet others will tell you that it’s an absolute crime against humanity, a pyramid scheme that destroys the planet, shame on you for taking part in NFTs!
To say that the discourse surrounding NFTs is polarizing is almost an understatement. We’ve previously covered the topic before, starting with this article and this one as a primer, and this one to introduce its problems, among others. However, seeing the continuing divide within the artist community, we find it apt to revisit this controversial issue and take a step back to ask what we really need to be discussing.
The blockchain dream
It’s easy to demonize people who get into NFTs as pyramid scheme scammers and victims who only want money and care very little about the environment. Spend some time on Twitter with the NFT haters and this caricature is mostly what you will get. This drives a ton of online bullying, so much so that Memo Akten took down his original cryptoart.wtf website (providing information on carbon emissions per NFT transaction) since it was weaponized as a tool of harassment. You can still find traces of this mob violence, as also evidenced by the existence of mental health support groups for NFT artists, such as this one on Clubhouse.
In the NFT space, support groups are extremely common—in fact, there is hardly a more supportive and encouraging online group of artists. The vibe is joyous, communal, with a very strong sense of wishing success for each other on this new frontier where artists can finally be seen, heard, and valued. Of course, one can say that this is just another feature of a pyramid scheme, selling wealth and success to gain more members. But seeing the optimism, positivity, support, and community amongst NFT artists and collectors on the one hand, and the mockery, bullying, hatred, and harassment against NFT artists on the other hand, it’s worth taking a step back and examine the dynamics of why NFTs exist in the first place.
A false narrative that has been making the rounds amongst the haters is that NFTs are somehow a new invention made only to further extract value by the already problematic hyper-capitalistic scheme of cryptocurrencies, this time by fooling digital artists by tugging at their desire for recognition and adequate compensation, but in truth selling absolutely nothing. This is simply not true. The discourse of blockchain art has been around almost as early as blockchain was used as cryptocurrency itself. Think about it: If blockchain technology can function as a decentralized ledger to note down various transactions in a very safe, reliable way that can be traced back to individual wallets, what’s stopping it to be used to note down other sensitive information that can be traced back to individual objects? What about smart contracts, royalties, or even the entire scope of digital rights management?
That was the original dream. Imogen Heap’s Mycelia, for example, envisions a world where music can be played anywhere, downloaded by anyone, cut up and remixed endlessly—and each of these bits of information will be recorded on the blockchain in a way that it can always be traced back to the original artist. If you are a musician, the system will ensure that you always receive royalties even if it was a fraction of a cent because a random cafe somewhere decided to play a third remix of a song containing a few loops of a four-second sample of your music. For the first time, it was possible to envision a technology that will allow DRM to get this granular and complex. Say goodbye to piracy!
Visual artists, too, can collaborate in a similar way. Media that are previously treated as no more than disposable content can now achieve the stature of fine art. Animated pieces, interactive pieces, VR and AR installments, pieces that are technologically randomized, designed to evolve through time, or respond to aleatory occurrences on planet Earth can suddenly have as much legitimacy as physical art objects through their crypto-powered tokens of authenticity, hence engineering scarcity in the digital realm.
Engineered scarcity was what kicked the recent NFT trend into high gear. From the collectible pixel art avatars of Cryptopunk to the collectible NBA clips on Top Shot or soccer clips on Sorare, NFTs start to enter a wider discourse. Cryptokitties, Etheremon, and Aavegotchi are among a few games that utilize crypto to power the collectible nature of their games.
Memes are being fully acknowledged in their historical value as artefacts of internet culture through their tokenization as NFTs. At the same time, VR-based galleries in metaverses—virtual reality universes we can walk around in—are seeing an increase in interest as the COVID-19 pandemic continues to stall the more traditional, physical art markets, creating a demand for digital collectible artworks. The high-profile art auction house Christie’s participated, hosting the famous $69 million purchase of Beeple’s “Everydays” collection (5000 images in total) in March 2021.
The stage is set; the ecosystem is ready. With all of these radical innovations, possibilities become wide open, especially for artists working in fields not yet recognized or even enabled in the more traditional art world. It truly looked like NFTs are shaping the future of the art world, and that future is glorious.
Image: Everydays by Beeple
The environment question
Except that it’s not. While the zeitgeist has been yearning for this digital renaissance, and the market is prepared and hungry, the technology is far from able to carry the original dreams and visions of artistic endeavors on the blockchain. Crucially, two key problems remain.
First, the environmental issue. To be fair, up to the time of writing there is not yet solid proof that NFTs in particular will cause carbon emissions of the entire network to increase. The Ethereum crypto network will continue to consume energy regardless of whether the NFT world is built on top of it or not. Yet on the other hand, there is little justification in saying that the entire NFT trend is statistically meaningless, since the increase in transactions have caused somewhat of a bubble in crypto economy, and surely that will accelerate the amount of environmental destruction? The lack of transparency of the platforms regarding specific energy consumption levels and CO2 emissions have contributed to much of the debate, and many defenders of NFT have made the argument that the traditional art scene—with its render farms, print industry, requirement of international logistics and air travel, and so on—is not much better off.
The truth is that it is extremely difficult to measure the impact of an individual NFT versus, say, an individual sale of a book, or an individual sale of a physical piece of artwork from a gallery. However, it must be noted that NFTs aren’t designed to replace these more traditional commodities and market mechanisms. Even if NFTs turn out to be greener than books and paintings, it will add on to existing carbon emissions instead of replacing them. Furthermore, many of the more environmentally-inclined artists have argued that even if NFTs are statistically meaningless since crypto networks will still exist anyway, partaking in technologies that are so harmful to the environment—technologies that are completely optional and done solely for monetary purposes—is a big ethical no-no.
Many are trying to solve this, such as moving from what is now called a Proof-of-Work solution (i.e. getting computers to solve puzzles) to a Proof-of-Stake solution (i.e. staking existing crypto money to authenticate transactions), utilizing green energy, and other innovations too technical to explain here. However, the baseline concepts that we must understand are the following: (1) Artworks are valuable because they are scarce; (2) This scarcity can be deliberately engineered through digital tokens; (3) Digital tokens are scarce because they are difficult to produce.
In other words, the NFT space brings forth an art world in which the value of artistic commodities are directly tied not to the difficulty of how they are made, but to the difficulty of cryptographic authentications upon which they are transacted. This makes perfect sense when you recall that what is being bought and sold is not art, but art certificates. The unfortunate implication of this is that, with the current technology, the value of art directly depends on the amount of energy needed to power crypto networks. Artistic prowess, originality, creativity, and so on are secondary to this and left purely in the goodwill of those who are active in the NFT space.
The copyright question
Second, the legal authentication issue. As we have previously mentioned in this article, there is a sheer disjunct between the certificate of authenticity of the digital file and the authenticity of the actual artwork as created by the artist. Blockchain technology has no definition of authenticity besides who was first to tell it that a certain piece of art is theirs (i.e. who gets to ‘mint’ the piece of digital art into an NFT). Whoever first shouts ‘This art is mine!’ gets to be recorded as the ‘original’ creator by the blockchain—and what’s worse, crypto technology virtually does not allow anything to be erased, which means this record of authenticity will stay that way forever.
Of course, this disjunct creates such a fertile field of art theft in wildly innovative forms. We have the more straightforward theft of scammers taking someone else’s piece of art and selling them as their own. We have collectives who steal a bunch of different images and mash them together to supposedly create a new piece before selling it, as in the case of Twisted Vacancy. We have tools of theft, such as Twitter bots that can automatically grab a tweet and all of the media attached and turn them into an NFT by simply mentioning a username. I’m sure there are more.
Image: Artwork from Ardneks (left) and Twisted Vacancy (right)
Of course, you can issue a DMCA takedown notice that may result in the aforementioned file-not-found condition (and further drama between the buyer and the scammer, in which you would hopefully not get dragged), but the blockchain ledger is still irreversible. More importantly, remember that all of this means the burden of work is on the artist whose art was stolen in the first place!
It’s easy to say that theft and crime will always happen in any kind of field—a defense most often voiced by NFT defenders. However, the practice of theft in the NFT world has two crucial features: theft is technologically enabled almost seamlessly into the system, and spurred on by a highly speculative and often ignorant market that is often willing to buy (unknowingly) stolen art for insane prices. Add this to the lack of real existing solutions to bridge the gap of the authenticity issue, and what you have is a feature, not a bug.
Crypto technologies were first conceived of as a way to protect artists and guarantee their rights and royalties, and NFTs today are often being marketed as a way for artists to keep earning royalties on future sales. The current practice manages to retain some of this dream—unlike the traditional art market, if your NFT is resold, you will earn from all of these subsequent sales, thanks to the advance book-keeping technology of the blockchain. So it’s quite ironic that this same technology overlooks authenticating originality of the art itself—no technology to see the full history of the production process, for example, what materials and tools are used and whether they infringe on any existing copyrights.
There is a good reason for this, as having to authenticate not just transactions but also every step of a file’s history will be much more resource-intensive, and with the current technology, much more environmentally damaging. And as with the issue of artistic valuation above where things are still mostly left to the goodwill of those active in the NFT space, so too are the issues of originality—it is really up to the artists whether or how much they steal, up to the buyers to do their due diligence, up to the platforms to weed out the bad apples. Crypto technology in its current form won’t help on that front.
Where does value in art come from?
My primary criticism for NFTs, then, is that the technology is focused on the wrong thing, i.e to create scarcity and generate as much money as possible, no matter at what cost. The art world, as it stands, is rife with schemes of money laundering and tax evasion. Cryptocurrency is infamous for being the currency of the dark web and its various illegal transactions, courtesy of its decentralization and anonymity. Combine the two together, and add to that the massive environmental costs needed to power the system, then you’ve got a recipe for disaster. No wonder people are angry.
At the same time, the sweeping dismissal of NFTs as just another evil and ultimately useless trend entirely misses the point of the original dreams of the technology—dreams that are much more closely related to empowerment and economic fairness rather than wild speculation happening today. The NFT space itself retains much of that, especially if you’ve spent any time interacting with their close-knit supportive communities.
I suppose it ultimately comes down to how we see value in art. Our tradition of artistic appreciation is deeply rooted in Enlightenment values of transcendence: great art is borne of individual genius and hard work; market mechanisms ultimately confer a somewhat objective value in financial form, due to market actors rationally behaving in appreciation of said genius. The artwork is greater than the sum of its parts—it transcends itself, for example by being a marker of history, and this transcendent value is then best captured by exorbitant amounts of money.
And yet there is another way of looking at art, which is the opposite way that I, following philosopher Timothy Morton, would call values of subscendence. The artwork is less than the sum of its parts: My little video loop was made possible by a Photoshop brush someone else made, a font someone else designed, animated with a software that a bunch of people worked hard on, with music samples from a musician remixing yet another musician, and so on. An artist’s individual genius and hard work is nothing compared to the massive amount of labor and connection that has allowed the piece of art to exist. I believe this is where art should derive its value—in interconnectedness, in communality. It’s not such a far stretch—if you look at indigenous cultures and traditions, you’ll know exactly that this is where art used to derive all of its value.
Blockchain technology can go either way. Its decentralized nature can and should be able to map out all of these rhizomatic connections of various objects and labour that are taking place, all while remaining anonymous and secure. Many of the crypto left movements, fringe as they are, do have this dream. Sadly, they are not the ones driving technological innovation. As it stands right now, the crypto art world remains driven by wild market speculation justified by narratives of empowerment within ideologies of transcendence—just as the entire transhumanist, consciousness-uploading, space-colonizing fantasies of Silicon Valley do. In the meantime, trees are burning and animals are screaming because we still have that whole climate crisis thing going on.
What is left for us to do? Of course, being critical of NFTs is a good first step. But it’s important to not devolve into an uncritical sweeping dismissal of the early dreams, or even the technology in general. It’s important not to demonize and harrass individual NFT artists, to apply the logic of incarceration to anyone involved in the NFT space. There is nothing wrong with artists wanting their share of acknowledgement, empowerment, economic fairness—those were the early dreams and promises of NFTs and those values are still what mostly animates various NFT spaces today. NFTs have lifted people out of homelessness, and I think this is worth a celebration, even if we do need to remain vigilant and critical of the technology itself.
Dialogues need to be made without turning into polarized flame wars. Technological solutions that do not rely on goodwill or dismissive attitudes need to be demanded, and innovations need to be transparent. But more than that, this is very much the time for a reflective discussion of what we consider valuable in artworks, and human innovation in general. Instead of erupting in a reactionary, inflammatory response towards the flaws of NFTs, it might be time to sit down and critically examine the parameters of what we see in the future of creative works, whether the foundation on which we see things such as ‘empowerment’ and ‘value’ have a solid ground to them.
With or without NFTs, it’s quite telling, after all, that an artist’s worth is directly tied to instruments of financial speculation for the world’s billionaires.
Disclaimer: The view expressed on opinion article doesn’t necessarily reflect the opinion of The Finery Report. The opinion belongs to the author of the article.
