It is a dilemma perhaps first articulated in 1935 when German philosopher and cultural critic Walter Benjamin wrote his famous essay on ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. At the beginning of the twentieth century, the development of photography meant that any aesthetic object – a painting, sculpture, image – suddenly gained the potential to be reproduced ad infinitum, in ways that diminished the sanctity, the fetishistic authenticity of any supposedly “original” work.
What is the value of the Mona Lisa, when an image of the Mona Lisa could suddenly be reproduced onto a postcard, a poster, even as trivial an object as a fridge magnet? The consequences of mechanical reproduction on what Benjamin described as the “auratic presence” of an original artwork conditioned a crisis of faith in established concepts of ownership, legitimacy, and authority of any truly “genuine” work.
Nearly a century later, in an age of digital reproduction, advancements in cryptocurrency technology have sought to develop a solution to a version of the same problem: the use of blockchain verification to make digital artworks unique, allowing for their ownership and sale. Non-fungible tokens (NFTs) are a blockchain product which, because of their non-fungibility (the fact of their uniqueness, unable to be interchanged as, say, a £5 note can be with any other £5 note) allow you to register the “original” version of any given digital asset. In Benjaminian terms, NFTs seek to restore the “aura” to a digital object by assigning it a unique virtual identifier that marks it as distinctive.
In theory, it offers what James Ball has described as “an unfalsifiable public ledger of ownership.” In practice, however, NFTs have no real-world correlation with the object they identify. Owning the NFT of a Banksy painting would not extend to ownership of Banksy’s copyright. To use a different metaphor, an NFT acts as a kind of virtual certificate that allows for the digital tracing of the ownership of a digital asset (a .MP3, a . JPG or . GIF), but which does not extend to your legal ownership of it as a commodity.
Whilst the possibilities for unique identification and therefore sale of digital assets have the art world in a state of frenzy, Mike Winkelman, the digital artist known as Beeple has said that NFTs are a bubble waiting to burst. Beeple’s every day: THE FIRST 5000 DAYS was the first-ever purely digital artwork to be sold by Christie’s, which sold for USD 69.3 million last month. “If it is not a bubble now, I think it will be at some point,” Beeple told CoinDeskTV, “as there are so many people rushing into this space.
But the technology behind it is so simple: it’s just proving the ownership of something, backed by the blockchain. It can be applied to so many things outside digital art.” But Beeple remains optimistic about its future despite its current volatility. “[…] as with the internet, there was a bubble […] but it didn’t kill the internet,” describing the tool as having a versatility that could ensure its long-lasting nature.
It has since been revealed that Beeple’s collage of 5,000 artworks was purchased by the Singapore-based blockchain entrepreneur and cryptocurrency investor, Vignesh Sundaresan, also known as “MetaKovan”, who claimed that he would have been prepared to spend more than the $69.3m he paid. “This is a significant piece in art history […] and I had the opportunity to be a part of this very important change of shift in how art has been perceived for centuries.
This is a change in medium, which means there are going to be hundreds of thousands of people from around the world who are going to adopt this digitally native medium, and there’s going to be an economy around it.” Asked on CNBC’s “Squawk Box” why he was prepared to pay so much for “a. JPG and a hyperlink”, Sundaresan replied that this is “the first piece of such an important movement” which is “going to be quite valuable in the future”.
Like previous historical fads of ownership and collectibility, the boom in NFTs is predicated upon economic speculation of their future worth. But James Surowiecki has argued that unlike other trade crazes in the past, with NFTs ‘it’s impossible to separate the boom in ownership from the boom in speculation.’ NFTs are not just about the prestige of “owning” a digital asset but are inherently bound up with an understanding of their potential future market value. Like other economic bubbles from history, it is widely predicted that NFTs, like the infamous “Tulip Mania” of the Dutch Golden Age, will crash once making a profit becomes harder due to an overly saturated purchasing market. Time will tell whether NFTs can survive their short-term craze.
To keep up with the latest commercial news, click on commercial to get your daily dose.
Donate & Support