Caesura Roundtable: The NFT. Read the introduction here.

If contemporary culture is full of shit, it is now leaking gas. But do the nebulae of flatulent hot air surrounding NFTs indicate a movement, or would burners rather just light a match?

It’s possible that humanity has become inflammable. Endlessly inflammatory, its plastic soul leeches toxic fumes, pluming noxious gasses. In despair, aspiring humans have turned to burning the next best thing, their surrogate — Art. 

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IMO, the cultural significance of the NFT hot air surrounding Art Basel Miami Beach was that it represents the convergence and potential consolidation of three cultural sectors that hitherto operated autonomously – The Wannabe Uncanny Silicon Valley / The Finest, Refined Contemporary Art Industry / Burning Man Pyros. These three “cultures” were often antagonistic, resentfully silent in their mutual disdain. Burning Man culture emerged in part from a very understandable discontent, though in extremis, with the sanitized, academic contemporary art bubbles and the militantly rationalized music industry. Technologists have typically worked overtime to improve a world that anyone with any artistic sensibility whatsoever — be they gas burners or contemporary art windbags — would rather challenge or whole-half-heartedly resign from. Ever since Kafka, any compelling artist remains deeply agnostic about future progress, suspending predetermined judgments about the future, and so trying to open up possibilities in the present. And the most refined Contemporary Artists (refined as in overprocessed like a commodity, e.g., sugar) have generally harbored silent derision towards Burner Art, not merely to protect their art school investments, but also because they have, somehow, despite the intentions of their educators, learned something about art and art history — if only negatively — at least enough to perceive that much of Burner Art et. al. is quite banal, unchallenging kitsch; they see past its flaming spectacles. But now differences are cast aside to join hands and ignite the collective nebula of the NFT. The Market is still the most successful social art project, though hardly successful: it consolidates vapid collectives that have been offgassing in cultural deserts in an apparent autonomy. But just as it is with any merger, the merge happens as a means to overcome some shortcoming in their separate enterprises. In this case, it is explicitly to financially overtake the big art and music businesses. The gasbags all suggest this is about value and values. As the only living Nietzschean reevaluator of all values, I’ll take the bait. 

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Any stormchaser on the great empty plains of contemporary culture might wonder what kind of storm has been invisibly building, ultimately colliding in the pressurized tension between mass fronts of narcissistic-sex-working-as-sex-withholding-pseudo-feminist-selfie-minting-artgirls, and repressed-tech-boys who appear to accrue wealth by virtue of the disciplined conservation of their semen, neither front of which cares to make any distinction between sex and JPEGs. We witness an annoying because merely natural culmination of a long-developing trend of adolescent anti-intellectualism that pathologically resists developing the aesthetic intelligence to draw distinctions between art and life. And so the expression of either is withheld. “Bring down the rain”, yeah?

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In my “Art in the Age of AI” article from 2017, I speculated that Silicon Valley would eat Contemporary Art’s lunch, mainly because contemporary art culture has backed itself into every marginal corner via rearguard aesthetic theories. (Yes, this category extends to the state-sponsored art that deceptively believes it evades contemporary gas.) All the while, so-called “tech bros” were retiring in their 30s, exploring newfound free time that allowed them to pursue self-education on all kinds of things — i.e., Art — as a means of “improving” the world. And any liberal who goes looking for the essence of free society will ultimately find that art is the camp where liberalism pitched its weathered tent. Not that the NFT powers-that-be care a damn about art, they care about profit, let’s be real. But they conflate art and profit because the prevalent art “theory” has given them license to make such a basic conflation. As the rearguard art jargons of our moment and the soulless art it fosters could, hypothetically, be easily sidestepped by anyone with any trace of critical reflection, it might allow the intelligent technologists to make a giant leap over the swamps that so many art students are eager to leap into. And paired with their resources, speculative technologists would then be free to steal the fumbled trophy of avant-gardism that the gaseous nebula of contemporary art created. Hypothetically.

Only a couple years later, NFTs were forged in this vulgar cauldron of the cultural turn’s steaming rot. Having gnawed its own tail to a paltry nub with the rabid fangs of identity politics and Millennial pseudo-Marxism, contemporary art had no other tail to chase. The new media artists who were once so relevant in the ‘00s’ net and post-internet art fought for the fumbled avant-garde trophy from self-imposed margins, becoming homeless Patreon Lords analyzing the swamp, The freshly minted art-tech-bro culture was poised to absorb the apparent meaning of their theory that the true and social, egalitarian art was on the internet, and not in galleries eating Thai food, or in lumpenized art activist project spaces where even the most insufferably ignorant passersby… sniff …whiffed that no art existed there anyway. 

Yet, in the truthful words of one insightful NFT artist, there’s a great deal of serious new media work that has been festering underground, unrepresented, just waiting patiently for its moment to be exposed in the illumination of market day. No, not the majority of ape-minded NFTs one reads about on tailist rags, the infantile crypto-bro analogue of infantilized adult Disney fangirls, but those who are the self-unconscious descendants of 19th century dilettantism and are as broadly educated in culture as they are uncommitted to art. Are these NFT days the bad new days, or just the bad old days? 

And dare one mention the contradiction inherent in the cost of entry to selling, er... participating democratically in NFTs — or, if IRL, passing beyond the blockchained gates to access the VSIP (Very Self-Important Person) chambers of private NFT events? And the more artists who follow the herd — has anything really changed except the consolidation of differently spotted herds? — the higher the cost of entry and saturation of the market. After the gaseous clouds of Art Basel bloat waft through “society,” “gas costs are unusually high”. You’d think the most successful financiers would understand something about rarification. But alas, their “art education” might subconsciously be a means to get the finance education they never received in liberal arts business school. Let’s be real, the gaseous NFT prophets are about profit. No, they’re not radicalizing aesthetic values. No. The self-delusion is glaring. The entry cost isn’t the problem, technically no different than artists saving up for paints or expensive music equipment via sheer will — except that musicians and guitar fabricators don’t hype that they’re making the world a better, more “egalitarian” place, peddling an ideology that they privately acknowledge is a bubble. The only reason big NFT ideologues are not typical NeoLiberal conmen — this is the 90s after all, innit! — is because, as students of artifice, they’re too self-deceived about their motives. 

Consider one random example: Catalog, a new music label (how many more must we endure?! Really, music labels are new?), which is all about “more equitable systems for releasing, distributing, and valuing music,” as they go on to justly, but resentfully, criticize their true competitor, Spotify, a low-hanging spotted fruit if ever there was one. Catalog is, surprise, an exclusive “invite only” platform. Whereas Spotify only pays artists fractions of pennies, Catalog only pays a fraction of the starving artists it purports to be heroically rescuing. At least with the truly awful streaming services, any artist can have music (ignored and artistically compromised) in the public sphere, participate in the dustbin of history, whereas the gated communities of the so-called new NFT music labels are really no different than how the music industry and art world already operate, by demanding the pay of escalating dues — from financial to spiritual — and toeing a vague party line. A music artist is faced with choosing between a stream or a cloud of gas as support. But really the bureaucracy is all beside the point of aesthetic experience, which is that so-called new NFT institutions don’t create new systems for valuing music and art. A new system for valuing music? Really? How is that? Pray tell, pious-NFT collective, what exactly are your new systems for valuing music? Which handpicked artists from the musical charnel-house make work that questions what it means to make music today, challenges norms of how to listen, and in a manner which is musically compelling? What is ‘good’ and ‘bad’? How is quality now determined in this new system? Is there any meaningful relationship whatsoever between equity and values? Is there any experiential difference in the music experience of the listener, how the listener listens and feels their feels, than you’d find on “corporate” radio? Is there any actual advancement of technique? Are status-quo listening habits truly being challenged, or just repackaged? The reevaluation of the meaning of art and music, of its latent possibilities and undefined limitations, is as incomplete as ever. The very idea of reevaluating values originates in Nietzsche’s 19th century philosophy — if reevaluating the values of music were truly what they were after, all they really need is pen and paper. But that’s not gaseous enough.)

Aesthetically, even when elevated, there was — only a brief few weeks ago, before herd mentality gripped the masses and NFTs were accepted into the lamest pantheon ever by tailist contemporary art rags — a healthy skepticism about the quality of this “new” art. True, there is as much a claim on JPEGs being fine art as, e.g,. photography has ever had. Just because it’s a digital file doesn’t mean it isn’t Art — any argument to the contrary will quickly be dissolved. Ever since Benjamin, art needn’t manufacture false auras — indeed, some of the most profound art is coolly nonsensual, appealing to the more abstract characteristics of aesthetic reflection. Benjamin’s canonized scripture on The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction revealed that the pleasure we seek is that of the loss of aura, a phenomenon that NFT artists might comprehend intuitively. Maybe. Superficially. Music is, after all, formalized air, and it has been riding the wave of vapors for some time. The abstract painting that has, at least since Greenberg, imitated the natural freedom of music is most profound and unique when, almost counterintuitively, its tangibility is reduced to flatness. The (academic) claim that painting is defined by its physicality has only led to a lot of kitschy impasto paintings and the type of uncommitted sculptural pseudo-painting wall reliefs that were rampant throughout the sprawling global MFA Exhib… errr… Untitled fair. Moreover, new media art has already been admitted into the pantheon with the post-internet art’s scrambling to manufacture its cultural importance from the first post-graduation breath, with contemporary “art historians” — who know art history the way a swamped body knows the swamp — and curator-theorists — who survey the present the way a paralyzed head blinks above the swamp — publishing historical anthologies of the medium as soon as someone would listen to their swampy monologues, those that ultimately told the ego-weak and valueless aspiring tech-culturati what the new frontier would be, i.e., nebulae of Gas. As if there were ever any doubt. In the millennial marxism of post-internet art and its special product, the “egalitarianism” of NFTs, one finds an attempt to shape gas. Hype is the core aesthetic value; Hyperbole its default literary trope. Full of hot air, it literally runs on gas. 

And yet more skepticism remains! The meaningful relevance of any art today will not be waged on logical justice games arguing its right to exist in art history (or to tear it down), but on its still mysterious, often unconscious capacity to move the spirit. It is unclear why patrons like the digital art they like, and the prospects of them going through the process of making these unconscious values conscious is almost laughable. And yet they have made it clear that they love these artists terribly. Or do they? The countless orphaned new media artists who might buy in may do so because they are not active agents in this movement — the true motives of the NFT movers is to disband the music industry and engulf the artworld. The artists, the masses of art workers, who appear as a more refined Proletkult are like a political football of big money giants. Will their art need to reflect the values of their superficially supportive patrons, e.g., the same style that academic state-sponsored art needs to reflect the Democratic Party’s values? Or will NFT artists who are self-critical of NFT values be silently blacklisted because they don’t reinforce the herd’s movement? 

Sadly, NFTs change little. Boring relational artists are now just boring NFT artists. In appropriating relational art, post-Internet art appears to have won that old debate… Or did they?! The digital art that sells the most right now is that which produces the most user-interaction. NFTs reveal that relational aesthetics and post-internet art have always been the same phenomenon, differing merely in surface technique and taste. Entertaining Instagram 3D artists are still just humorously entertaining 3D Instagram artists. The NFT thing doesn’t really change the quality of the art, and such an expectation for institutions, as such, to transform aesthetic experience is where the New World Cultural Merger might merely continue the old world cultural stasis of the contemporary art ideology that culminated in the post-internet’s postmodernist form of institutional critique. And if there might be an aesthetic possibility in this NFT culture, it is that newer, younger NFT artists have returned net art to its earlier, more naive incarnations before it was quickly jaded-over and academicized by post-internet art. There is something repressed that is being brought out into the open with all these JPEGs flying around; but it also has the air of ‘But I can be an artist, too! I’m just as talented as these artworld hacks’. We shall see. But it is indeed true that the more “elevated” NFT artists have absorbed post-internet’s art history lessons — and those lessons, like any postmodern ideology, had a shallow art historical imagination that reflected only as deep as the 1960s, which it secretly idealized as a golden era: it explains why ‘elevated’ NFT art is derivative Mis-Conceptual Art pedanticism (see Robert Storr on misconceptualism). This lofty naivete is often expressed as a return to the 90s. And Burners are happy to provide the cliché trippy beats as playlist, hopelessly hoping to ignite a cloud of gas.

Oh yes, the 90s’ derivative dream of the 60s is alive in the open sea of gas! Is Alex Grey’s psychedelic art any more aesthetically gripping because it was mediafied and shown on a large screen instead of a painting or print? Certainly, many viewers might’ve thought so, but overhearing conversations, they came expecting it to be mind blowing and took as much Soma as possible to ensure that transcendence would not elude their desperate seeking. What is more interesting is that artists like Alex and Allison Grey, who have grown alongside, e.g., the Burners to create an autonomous culture outside of contemporary art, have always represented the lack which was felt by that culture when confronting the so-called totalizing contemporary art world — the missing spirit of the ersatz ironic. “Outsider Art” constantly returns. It is not quite as positive and autonomous as it may appear. It is not that this work is good or bad here, per se, but that it exists at all. And a culture in which the determination of meaningful pleasure is subconscious, where its representation is justified by its mere existence without ever appealing to a challenging, dissonant consciousness, undermines any claim that the new generation of admirably naive NFT artists might have in creating new values. The rotely perfect symmetry of the art presented on the 3D screen at a Miami Basel adjacent NFT event, that lacks any dissonance whatsoever, is a metaphor for such a new hyperconsonant aesthetic, with a difference being that now a big-collar announces it, like a Vaudeville showman, as the greatest spectacle on earth. Don’t get me wrong, I love a phantasmagoria and attendant drug-induced optical trance as much as any 19th century flâneur. But have the stereoscopes and zoetropes that transfixed the public well over a century ago proven more compelling than the dissonant art produced by avant-garde painters and composers at that same historical moment? 

The “future of art” — notwithstanding the self-contradiction of such a claim, i.e., like saying “the future of the present” — is very possibly going to be science-fair-meets-Duchamp mediocrity over-inflated with repressed wealth and gaseous hyperbole. In other words, advertisements for transcendence without the actual transcendence. Ads for pleasure without the pleasure. Perhaps the best art that comes out of this will be that which plays most freely with the artistic trope of hyperbole, and taps into the artifice of the promise of cultural justice. Reservoirs that can be added to, but not that the thirsty can drink from. Perhaps that is all that art has ever been — the infinite amount of hope, but a hope that is not for us (Kafka). The powers that be would have the contemporary artistic mind choose between advertisements for transcendence, sans the actual transcendence (market art), and advertisements for justice, sans the actual justice (social academic art, museums, etc.). That, or minor, “sincere” paintings in the Morandi mode, churned out by the thousands in just as manufactured a way as any NFT, if not more so, resignationism repackaged as good Obamified taste. That, or buying into the value of art by the color of the artist’s skin or the genitals they’re currently styling. For the meantime, art critics and artists — and the silent multitudes who teeter on the wrong side of history — who truly burn for aesthetic dissonance will continue to turn their eyes towards the dark side of the Moon, finding their metaphorical image in “the loneliest man in history,” gazing upon stranger, distant stars. But even The Loneliest Man occasionally returns to Earth to gaze upon the beautiful faces, swim against the tide on Miami beaches, and party with the artifice of hyperbolic hearts desperate to go up in flames.

More from Caesura Roundtable: The NFT. Allison Hewitt Ward on burning it all down.