One Year of the Beeple Craze: A Cool Reflection on Whether NFTs Changed Artists, but Did They Change Art?

Source: “The New York Times”

Original Author: Blake Gopnik

Translation: Halesman, Chain Catcher

Around 1425, the Florentine artist Masaccio painted the first major works using linear perspective. This breakthrough expanded the creative scope for artists in the years to come.

In 1839, Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre showcased his newly invented photography in Paris. It changed the nature of visual representation, and museum walls have never been the same since.

A year ago, on March 11, 2021, Mike Winkelmann, known as Beeple, sold a "computer-generated collage" for $69 million, simply because this collage was attached to a digital certificate called an NFT. This record-breaking price sparked a frenzy among various creators—illustrators, musicians, photographers, and even a few seasoned avant-garde artists joined the NFT gold rush.

In the following 12 months, approximately $44 billion was spent on around 6 million NFTs. The funds were mostly used to authenticate digital creations, but sometimes also for physical works like paintings and sculptures.

However, did this massive tsunami of "NFT art" really change the face of art and lead to a significant transformation in some sense? It’s hard to say, and such a change is almost impossible: because "NFT art" simply does not exist.

Mike Winkelmann's digital artwork "Everydays—The First 5000 Days" sold for $69 million at Christie’s. This piece is a collage of 5000 digital images.

An NFT is a non-fungible token—just a certificate of ownership and authenticity that can be attached to any type of object, even sneakers or newspaper articles, which cannot be altered or lost because it exists on the blockchain.

Imagine an NFT as the deed to a house: it tells you who owns it and perhaps some details about it, but you would never talk about a "designated house" as if it were different from other ordinary old houses. The same goes for "NFT art" and traditional "art."

Typically, the NFT you receive will be a digital file, possibly a JPEG image or an MP4 video, existing on some hard drive, looking exactly like the art forms that existed decades before NFTs appeared. Of course, even the most unconventional works, like Fewocious’s autobiographical animations of a transgender youth, would still be rated as "good" or "bad" depending on personal taste, even without the "certification" of an NFT.

At the first gallery exhibition held by Jack Hanley in New York, Beeple himself was trading digital for physical: he showcased prints, sketches, and paintings—as if his works had never had any essential NFT style from the very beginning.

If hackers successfully destroyed every NFT, 99.9% of the NFT "certified" works would remain unchanged. (We will discuss the remaining 0.1% later, as this is the interesting and important part of the story: the very few NFTs that might bring about new art.)

Rudolf Frieling, the head of media arts at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, said, "I would wholeheartedly support the idea that there is no such thing as NFT art; there is only art or digital art." He has been a pioneer in collecting various forms of digital art, from websites to 3D printed sculptures. Frieling also mentioned, "Frankly, I find the idea of holding an 'NFT art exhibition' absurd."

Michael Bouhanna, an expert at Sotheby’s in London, has extensive experience selling NFTs and other digital artworks. He believes that soon, as the novelty of NFTs fades, people will only talk about "digital art," relegating NFTs to a detail in ownership transfer.

The reason for creating NFTs is "sales," not aesthetics. In 2014, experienced digital artist Kevin McCoy worked until dawn at a tech-friendly art festival at the New Museum in New York, where he and a tech expert named Anil Dash created what is considered the first NFT (even though the concept of NFT did not exist at that time).

A few weeks ago, I met with 55-year-old Kevin and his 53-year-old wife Jennifer, who have been partners in life and art since 1990. Kevin McCoy explained that as early as 2014, he was looking for a way to prove authorship and transfer ownership of the digital works he and his friends created, most of which failed to sell. After all, a digital file, whether a video or a JPEG like Beeple’s, can be endlessly and perfectly replicated. Of course, from another perspective, if artists want their ideas to have a broad impact, perhaps that should be the case.

What we need is a way to make some of these copies into " originals ," to distinguish them from other copies. McCoy realized that blockchain could serve as a virtual vault. By assigning contracts as NFTs to artworks originally stored in basements, collectors suddenly had something tangible to hold and trade.

The McCoy couple stated that their newly designed identifiers would help digital artists and artworks survive and thrive, allowing them to sell their works as easily as painters and sculptors. Jennifer said, "You feel like you have the freedom to think."

Eight years later, this idea finally paid off for the McCoy couple. The first NFT created by Kevin sold for $1.4 million at Sotheby’s last June.

In the hype, no one can make money

But NFTs have not had such a significant impact on most artists. I asked economist Ethan McMahon from the analysis firm ChainAnalysis to analyze some data, and the results showed that about half of NFTs sold for less than $400—barely enough to cover the "minting" gas fees for creators, let alone the costs of maintaining a digital studio (many NFTs that cost money to mint even fail to sell, and they make up a large proportion).

McMahon also stated that almost all NFT resale activity occurs in the high-end market; only there can money be made, while the vast majority of NFTs are hardly resold. "Those trying to profit from the frenzy of the NFT space really need to be careful… because many times, it ultimately works against you."

What gives NFTs a large following?

If these NFTs can bring in more focused audiences, some tech enthusiasts might be satisfied, as they do not expect NFTs to yield higher salaries. The NFT craze has attracted a group of digital natives who have closer ties to collectors in the art market.

48-year-old Irishman John Gerrard believes that those eager to become NFT newcomers have the potential to create "a revolution supporting digital creativity." Before NFTs emerged, his digital art had already earned him widespread recognition. In 2014, a massive LED screen in Lincoln Center in New York displayed dazzling real-time images of a solar power plant in Nevada, entirely composed of 0s and 1s from Gerrard's computer.

However, despite Gerrard's tremendous success, he once thought that the art world had largely abandoned digital works like his in favor of those dominating an increasingly conservative painting scene. Thus, the popularity of NFTs might lead to a new gallery community that will be virtual, a market for the most appealing digital files.

But Gerrard may have misunderstood the true meaning of NFTs. Just as no one collects a 1916 Babe Ruth card to appreciate the portrait on it, nor does anyone collect an "Inverted Jenny" stamp to admire the biplane it carries, the vast majority of NFTs auctioned to the "stratosphere" are due to their rarity and collectibility. They have little to do with artistry, satisfying human needs and drives that are entirely different from fine art.

However, these needs include demands for community, ownership and its power, and social recognition, revealing the true artistic potential of NFTs.

NFTs as Artistic Inspiration

Amy Whitaker, a professor of art world economics at New York University, says, "Art exists in a world where people are always making political choices about their relationship with economics." The way NFTs are bought, sold, and appreciated automatically raises questions about ownership and its significance. Generosity (NFT images should be freely shared) and greed (buying them mainly to make crypto-rich people richer). The NFT craze is a form of collective behavior, as well as an issue of individualism, often revolving around who can fund a creation. Whitaker states that in NFTs, such social "contingencies" take center stage, while on the other side of the vast aesthetic divide lies traditional fine art.

But in fact, these connections to social and economic factors are at the core of the most innovative and challenging art of the past few decades. Take the art form known as "commercial art," for example, in which the act of buying and selling has transformed into the work itself within its cultural complexity. About 60 years ago, Yves Klein, Andy Warhol, and various conceptualists of the 1960s pioneered this genre, which later became popular in the 1990s with Damien Hirst's works.

Last summer, Hirst became one of the first art stars to enter the NFT market. He called his project "The Currency": the NFTs he offered corresponded to his 10,000 live paintings; after a year, collectors could choose to keep the blockchain token and burn the physical painting or keep the painting and forfeit the NFT. The commercial artist Hirst is grappling with the tension between market forces and aesthetic pleasure. The project was produced by the art services company HENI, with initial sales revenue of about $18 million.

The NFTs created by crypto-native artist Pak can also be placed within commercial art: the digital images he offers possess the purest visual interest—any designer can improvise on the smallest cube, but they are sold in the form of NFTs, which creates a significant impact in this strange way. They are offered to the public for only a few minutes at a time, and the total number you purchase affects the NFT image you receive. If we are looking for true "NFT art," and if NFTs themselves are valid, then Pak's digital commercial art qualifies.

There is also a more cunning art form known as "relational art," which aims to reveal human interactions by triggering new interactions. As early as 1992, Thai artist Rirkrit Tiravanija created a classic example: he began cooking curry and offered it to museum visitors, not for the food, but to draw attention to what it means to provide such a service.

Just as Tiravanija experimented with food and generosity, CryptoPunks, as an early NFT series, can be seen as an experiment focusing on the act of collecting and its significance.

CryptoPunks were born in June 2017 when programmers Matt Hall and John Watkinson generated 10,000 different cartoon images of heads using some basic code, pixelated to such an extent that you could only recognize a few identifying features: hats or hair. Initially free, but due to limited supply and variety, CryptoPunks became one of the most collectible items, with each now worth millions of dollars.

At the end of February, Sotheby’s planned to sell a batch of 104 CryptoPunk NFTs for $30 million, but the consignor withdrew at the last minute, and the auction was canceled. "People were very frustrated," NFT collector Kent Charugundla said, noting that the skyrocketing collectibles market might begin to shake.

This explanation suggests that even if new art places the NFT aspect on the table with all its social and economic complexities, it cannot escape the greed capitalism that has become its core. Tina Rivers Ryan, a curator at the Albright Knox Museum, stated during a Zoom talk that if digital artists believe NFTs bring a rich future to their overlooked medium, the new world of tokens may bring "a poverty—not just of digital art but of art as a whole, as it turns art into a frictionless commodity."

But Ryan pointed me to a remote corner of the NFT world, where ongoing work is hindering everything from proceeding as usual. A year ago, just as NFTs were gaining popularity, Kelani Nichole, founder of the brick-and-mortar gallery Transfer dedicated to various computer arts, helped organize an online NFT exhibition called "My Fragments," aimed at "reflecting on NFTs through a curatorial framework emphasizing ethics, wealth redistribution, artist representation, and rights."

Some artists offered works for free ("explicitly rejecting the capitalist desire for consumption"), while others provided works that did not conform to the standards of the NFT world. For example, a piece by Londoner Danielle Brathwaite Shirley consists of a low-fidelity GIF displaying a series of written "terms and conditions," promising buyers to "exhibit and invest in the works of Black cross-cultural artists," and then in the binding contract of the NFT, collectors agree to adhere to these commitments, print them out, and post them for two years.

Kim Laughton's NFT work "Ascetic"

The buyer of Kim Laughton's "Ascetic" NFT receives an "antithetical" work: ownership of a real gold chain and gemstone chain, along with a title word, and a digital image of the work for sharing, this project captures the contradiction in the NFT world between trendy immaterial claims and the reality of hype-driven profit.

Not all works in this exhibition had much new to say to critics, and certainly, they did not urgently need to express themselves through NFTs. In summary, they turned this exhibition into a piece of "meta-art." Meta-relational art reflects what it means to be an artist, curator, or collector in our "Beeple" era.