After the NFT Takeover of Art Basel Miami Beach 2021

It has been a very long time since anything that felt genuinely new happened in the art world. Twenty years into the 21st century, we are still chasing the tail of the past one in a hodgepodge of relational aesthetics, new media, and installation passing for art of the present. Finally, an odd contender for genuine novelty has emerged not from within art, but within the emergent cryptocurrency market: the non-fungible token, or NFT. But the tokens’ apparent novelty has proved disorienting for an art world not as well versed in blockchain/crypto tech as it believes itself to be and desperate to call any slight reconfiguration a utopian opportunity (just as it did with relational aesthetics). 

The lessons of the past have not been learned. Just fifteen years ago, we were all in a flurry about the democratizing potential of social media, especially after the Arab Spring, the liberatory trajectory of Second Life, and the liberating decentralization of post-Fordism/late neoliberalism, only to be embarrassed upon the discovery that populism does not lead to utopia, Second Life was a dud, and post-Fordism is largely responsible for current supply chain issues. Oops. But here we are again, titillated by blockchain, alternatives to museums and traditional galleries, Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs), the post-human metaverse. 

NFTs on their own are boring. They are digital ledger lines on the blockchain designating ownership. They are not a new medium. In fact, their connection to the JPEGs and GIFs whose sale and transfer they enable is a tenuous one: the code itself contains no metadata. They’re a tool, not a revolution, and they aren’t a utopian art project; they’re the technology that allows the sale and purchase of immaterial commodities, a precondition for any possible success of the metaverse.

For digital art, which emerged decades ago from the tradition of postmodern new media art, NFTs represent a solution to a longstanding problem: the difficulty of selling and displaying a GIF as one would a painting. Its proponents insist that it is a critical intervention as an immanent critique in the full proliferation of digital existence, but how critical is it when it requires its viewers to create digital wallets and jump on the crypto wagon? This sector too often appears naive about reality.

For cryptocurrency investors and tech workers, they represent financial opportunities and the ground on which to create an art world all of their own. They are deeply naive about art and often disarmingly sincere in their excitement about it. The pervasive infantile aesthetic preferred by this group is a reflection of its emergent character. Is there any potential in this new art market, which seems poised to edge out the old as it is integrated into art fairs, galleries, and auction houses? Is capital, even in its present decrepit form, more progressive than art theory?

We take the NFT phenomenon not as a technological one with technical problems and technical answers, and even less so as a potential embodied in the software it uses. Blockchain may be decentralized, but Sotheby’s and Christie’s, where NFT stars like Beeple have been taking their work direct to market, certainly are not. Art-for-NFT may eschew elite curation from MFAs and PhDs but relies instead on other hierarchies that have more to do with celebrity and straightforward access to money than visual quality, let alone conceptual positioning. It has already proven itself not to be the very thing its digital art proponents hoped it would be: an equitable market (as if such a thing exists) cleared of undesirable barriers. To the contrary, the majority of transactions are concentrated in the top 10% of market actors and the average artist has nearly no shot at making a buck let alone an impact by minting an NFT and posting their work on OpenSea, the most popular NFT marketplace. 

The NFT phenomenon is a social, not technological, phenomenon emerging from the new money of the 21st century — the tech sector — working out its own culture and aesthetic tastes as an alternative to the self-critical or self-defeating aesthetic culture that has been dominant since the emergence of liberal society in the 19th century. If there is any potential in this trend it is there, not in lines of code. Perhaps it is better to be naive about art than about reality.

With contributions from Allison Hewitt Ward on the past set ablaze, Bret Schneider on hyperconsonance, Laurie Rojas on the absolute commodity and more.