The recent NFT art craze brings to mind a particular moment in Martin Scorsese’s documentary “Pretend It’s a City” about Fran Lebowitz and starred by Fran Lebowitz. There’s something absolutely captivating in watching a mind so prolific, so quick, and so damn funny perform its acrobatics on the fly. It’s impossible to look away. There are many moments where Lebowitz displays her brilliance, but the moment in the film I keep thinking about right now is this one: Lebowitz talks about art auctions—the big ones, the Christie’s and the Sotheby’s. She explains that the art is unveiled in total silence and the crowd only claps when the final price is set and the auction is over. Lebowitz goes on to explain that this moment sums up the art world. It’s the not the art that’s being applauded, but the price. Commerce has replaced the critic. The recent NFT craze can be summed up in a similar way. It’s the obvious next iteration in an art world that has become more like the stock market and less like the keeper of our culture’s greatest creative treasures. When art becomes a commodity to be preserved in a storage unit, what’s the difference between buying art for your “collection” and a stock portfolio? And now, with NFT’s, you don’t need a storage unit at all. NFT’s (the acronym for non-fungible token) are basically new forms of cryptocurrency. What’s being purchased is not the trademark, nor the rights to the digital art, but the unique key and right to claim ownership to the art; Esquire has a really good article about just how NFTs work if you care to dig deeper). NFTs aren’t “art” any more than cryptocurrency is art. NFTs make the buying of the work an art itself. And perhaps that’s the point. In a culture where performative consumption is seen as the highest good, it’s no wonder that the exchange would be removed from the equation entirely, leaving the buyer with nothing more than “bragging rights.”
Questions of ownership always have philosophical implications (to the indigenous Americans for example, land was not something that could be bought or sold). I really do believe that some pieces of art are so central to a cultural psyche that they should be owned by the culture, not by an individual, but nowhere are the philosophical implications of ownership so front-and-center than in the case of the NFT, where ownership is the sole right being “purchased” and where the purchase itself has become newsworthy. Anyone can still upload the image online and display it on a computer screen, for free, but ostensibly, a piece can only be “minted” onto the blockchain once (or as a limited edition) by the artist as an NFT. Only one person can claim ownership of a given NFT. The Internet has truly become the new frontier, and now everything is up for sale, open to claim, or outright steal.
NFTs made national news when the New York Times put out this headline: “Why an Animated Flying Cat With a Pop-Tart Body Sold for Almost $600,000.” The short story is that Chris Torres, the illustrator of the flying cat with rainbows coming out of its butt, recently sold a one-of-a-kind NFT of his “Nyan Cat” and it sold for $580,000. I don’t think Chris Torres would have been called an “artist” before he made these headlines, and he himself seemed shocked by the price his piece fetched. He was more an animator, an illustrator, a meme creator. I certainly wouldn’t have called him an “artist.” But now, he’s being mentioned in the hallowed halls of Art Forum. Grimes is too. And Christie’s has joined the bandwagon, as Art Forum also reports Beeple’s JPEG “EVERYDAYS: THE FIRST 5000 DAYS” being sold for $69 million in auction.
Never mind the atrocities contained in this JPEG. Jerry Saltz, the great Pulitzer-prize winning art critic commented on his Instagram account about some of the “sickenly sexist, racist, xenophobic bullshit images included in the fake artist Beeple’s 69,000,000 NFT.” The image collection includes illustrations of Black men drawn in a stereotypically racist manner, with the words “it’s fun to draw black people!” below. In another image, an Asian-American man is depicted with a pejorative label below. Misogynist art is also on offer in Beeple’s JPEG, with statements encouraging the Dalai Lama to perform sexual assault. Maybe Christie’s will be selling art by the Proud Boys next?
Saltz’s commentary is to-the-point: “For now, this is crapola… Producing one piece of frictionless cryptocurrency value transfer token equals the carbon burned for 1,500 hours of jet flying… Right now this is just the market being so stupid that it only buys what other people in the market have already bought. A dog eating its own shit—coprophagia.”
While some claim that the NFT phenomenon creates opportunities for online creators who otherwise wouldn’t be able to make money from their work, the NFT craze is also open to fraud. While the authenticity of an NFT is traced to the blockchain, much like cryptocurrency, and therefore has a secure provenance once the NFT has been uploaded and validated, there is still room for manipulation and fraud. Who is to stop someone from stealing someone’s online digital art, claiming ownership, “minting” it online, and then selling it as an NFT? How are the online art marketplaces validating all this uploaded art?
While NFTs may seem like a means for lower income artists to sell their work, uploading NFTs comes at a price. Time reports that it starting-up can cost anywhere from $40 to $200, and other venues require an application. There’s the real risk that people with money to spare might take advantage of lesser-capitalized artists. Esquire already reports that there are accounts taking artists’ social media art, minting it on these platforms, and selling it as their own. Without clear guidelines, Esquire also notes that vulnerable emerging artists may be at risk of losing their rights to more powerful and moneyed interests. I wouldn’t put my art out as an NFT as a young artist–if only to protect my rights and make clear that any of my art on the NFT markets isn’t authentic. (Actually, let me be clear, any art on this website will never become an NFT–there.)
But there’s yet another reason why artists and buyers should think twice before joining the NFT craze—and that’s the sheer ecological cost of minting, mining, and validating a single NFT on the blockchain. The computing power required to keep track of all these blockchain transactions is immense. In a world where our planet is warming daily, I’m wary of any system that adds to environmental destruction, especially a system built on such unchecked greed. Icebergs are melting as we speak, leading to rising sea levels. While there are things I do daily that have an ecological impact, making and buying NFTs is entirely avoidable.
Finally, the NFT phenomenon is yet another instance where commerce and capitalism are replacing the work of the critic. The value of the work replaces critical appraisal. We hear about the $69 million JPEG sold, not the blatantly racist and misogynistic art within it, until after it’s fetched such an obscene price. I’ve written elsewhere about the dangers of confusing what is popular for what is “good,” the dangers of mistaking the easily liked for the important or lasting, the risk of conflating depth with mass appeal. This isn’t to say that there isn’t value in something like “Cyan Cat” or that there isn’t something culturally important in its existence that may be worth commenting upon—enough to inspire someone to want to be the sole owner of the work. I actually think the NFT craze has brought to light the importance of recording some of the most significant breakthroughs in internet culture, a culture which is largely intangible. Blockchain creates the illusion of tangibility in a medium that is so ephemeral. If we were committing to only using blockchain to preserve the most significant or best, and if the cost of preservation matched the true environmental cost, I’d be more for it. If the art preserved was the art owned by the culture because it shaped the culture, I’d also be all for it. But what we see now is an open eBay of thousands of people all rushing to mint everything from Tweets to cherubs, expending massive amounts of energy and carbon in the process, all in the hopes of making a buck from the bubble before it pops.
Perhaps the art market isn’t so different from the stock market after all? Stocks rise to stratospheric new heights, while the average person and small business goes under. NFTs do the same, while the emerging artist and the non-capitalized artist continues to struggle. Money never reflects value—look at what we pay teachers compared to what we pay most other “high value” positions in society. The NFT craze is another metaphor for capitalism’s invisible hand showing how sane it truly is.
Meanwhile, in my backyard, on the island of O’ahu, where food costs more than twice what it does everywhere else because industrialized agriculture destroyed every food-growing farm (so we have to ship all our food from halfway across the earth in container ships, guzzling oil and releasing carbon in the process), when I go diving, the corals are still bleaching, whales are still crying their songs as they give birth, and every living creature in the sea has less food to eat. The computers keep on humming and consuming kilowatt hours, but it’s all good, someone’s making millions selling NFTs, just no artists I know here in Hawai’i, where the only thing I see going up is the sea level on the North Shore.
About the Writer
Janice Greenwood is a writer, surfer, and poet. She holds an M.F.A. in poetry and creative writing from Columbia University.