Caesura Roundtable: The NFT. Read the introduction here.

A few miles inland from the comparatively staid art markets that set up shop for the week in Miami Beach, an anonymous crypto collective calling itself FIRESALE is preparing to set a Takashi Murakami edition on fire and turn it into an NFT. It’s part of WAGMIAMI, one of the many NFT-themed events — running alongside a Burning Man brand concert — that have made a sudden and substantial entrance into Miami Art Week. 

FIRESALE is not the first to deign to set original artworks on fire to establish some relationship with the blockchain. Damien Hirst released an edition of prints attached to NFTs: after one year, the owner has the option of deleting the NFT or burning the print and keeping the NFT. Another group, The Burned Picasso, announced they’d be doing just that in the summer of 2021, but apparently failed to execute it. The artist Brad Troemel, in his parody project Victimstrong, lit up reproductions of work by a number of “harmful” artists — victims of recent cancellations, living and dead, like Jon Rafman, Dana Schutz and Pablo Picasso — with the ostensible aim of using the heat generated to power bitcoin mining to power and destroy more artworks that perpetrate “literal violence.” It’s pretty funny. What’s notable about FIRESALE is that they’re really going to do it. They have before, making their threat credible enough that someone purchased another of their collection of doomed Murakamis well above market value to save it from the flames. It’s sweet, kind of like adopting a shelter puppy to save him from the needle, but if the puppy was rather pricey, not cute, and had no obvious reason to exist in the first place. 

I have absolutely no business covering this latest adventure of art and tech. I am not a critic of digital art, nor am I particularly knowledgeable about its inner workings, which seems to be a prerequisite for its enjoyment. New media art tends to bore me. I am not fully convinced that cryptocurrency is not a pyramid scheme, and god help me if this metaverse thing — the sublimation of our entire lives into the digital world where we can buy immaterial commodities and screw immaterial lovers with the help of VR headsets — really takes off this time, after threatening to for at least thirty years. While I wish I had more cause for optimism, I find this entire century banally disappointing. If contemporary art wanted me to be less pessimistic about it, it could always suck less, a feat it is unlikely to achieve simply by transferring its efforts from physical to digital media. But it's this very skepticism, taken to the extreme, that has cured me of any notion of art’s moral superiority and inured me to anger at “transgressions” against it.

One member of the group is quick to point out that the two editions of Murakami’s 2017 Thinking Matter: Red are the only material artworks in the show (for the time being), which otherwise contains several dozen flatscreens with NFT GIFs and JPEGs, a massive projection that kicks into full gear later in the night with technically impressive 3D animations, and vitrines housing iPads displaying the clipart rock NFT that made headlines in August for selling for $1.3 million, a number that has been dwarfed by subsequent NFT sales. It’s EtherRock, a brand, a concept, a thing that exists that delights in its pointlessness. The fact that no artist is named gives it a proximal sense of living autonomy and the transfixing mystery of an automaton. It is invigorating to see autonomous art once again at play in this age of the fully instrumentalized art of pseudo-politics.

Neither of the two representatives of FIRESALE present (there are four of them in total) are coming at it from the art world, but they’re both rather excited about art and seem to genuinely believe that burning this print and sending it into the metaverse as an NFT will give it an eternal afterlife, even as they somewhat amusedly admit that the actual link between the burned picture and the piece of code available for purchase on OpenSea is entirely arbitrary, not dissimilar from the link between ISBN barcode numbers and the book editions they track: nothing in the number expresses the content of the book, but there’s a very reliable ledger that ties the two together. 

If the FIRESALE guys are trying to play the role of crypto douchebags raining terror on art world snowflakes, they’re doing a very bad job of it; they’re perfectly delightful and excited to talk about their endeavor. They share the naive techno-utopianism of the “real artists” working with NFTs: decentralization and digitalization are the road to utopia. But unlike the “real artists,” they’re not compelled to artfully invert their naivety into critique; they have none of the academic art world’s love-hate relationship to capital that sees the latter, at best, as a necessary evil, even as it forms the foundation on which our whole byzantine endeavor lies. 

This ought to be abundantly clear in Miami, of all places, a city barely a century old, built on dirty money and cocaine (according to my Uber driver), which has exploded in the past 20 years thanks to culture. Basel arrived in 2002, followed by a small galaxy of satellite fairs. A recent museum, PAMM, looks out on the waterfront backed by residential skyscrapers that pop up like weeds. There comes a point when the veneer of respectability afforded by culture becomes, simply, respectability. In Miami, we’re watching in the present what proper cities like New York, and Paris before it, did in centuries past. 

The same is true of NFTs, which have given cryptocurrency a purpose. Until recently, crypto was for black market endeavors (drugs, and far less savory exploits) and techno-utopians who invested on the principle of decentralization and privacy. NFTs, infantile and inane as most of them are, give it that veneer of respectability and draw in respectable art world types who, conveniently, must buy the currency of choice, Ethereum, in order to participate. Attendance at WAGMIAMI is gained only by purchase or gift of particular NFTs, and it’s only by luck and pluck that I managed to attend without even my own digital wallet.

Art is the vanguard of capital. It turned Miami into Miami, it’s sophisticating crypto while helping  to drive up its value, it’s smoothing the way for AR, VR, and the metaverse just as early photography and video art turned nifty emergent technologies, with no clear need, into irreplaceable components of culture. It was with art that the Medici transformed themselves from new money into a force of history and art; even when it insists on its own criticality, it is naturalizing these new developments in tech and finance.

The best art of our species was made of capital, by capital, for capital. In the 17th century, the Dutch discovered speculative markets in the form of a flower. All the possibility and catastrophe of a new form of life — bourgeois society — bloomed in the tulip. Every kind of man bid in bars and backrooms for bulbs in hope that they would produce some rare and precious blossom. Artists were commissioned to paint the image of what was to come: the promise of beauty. The tulip was the first bubble to burst. Fortunes gained were quickly lost. That kind of wealth, so enormous and sudden, and so suddenly gone, was as fantastical as it was real. (Curiously, the crypto guys know about this and its similarity to what’s happening in their own market and seem…fine with this?)

The thing that we call art was conceived in that century. Pictures and sculptures and strokes of the brush had existed for millennia, but this — this precious, precarious thing — was new and it belongs just to us moderns; the invention of a species becoming fully conscious of itself, no longer destined to reproduce but to produce, no longer satisfied with being and grasping for becoming.

It was a long pregnancy, the gestation of this thing we call art. And then, in 1793 she was born to the bourgeoisie at their most radical. A year after the Jacobins relieved Louis XVI of his head, they turned the Palais du Louvre inside out. They were radical, all-destroying. All that was old was bound for the guillotine, but in that last instance they discovered transformation. Rather than burn all the canvases expropriated from fallen estates, they gathered them in one place, they made them something else. They willed into existence the Musée du Louvre and with it “the people.” Those who would hold art and those who would delight in it. 

These were the years that conjured beauty. Not a cheap beauty that mimics the divine, but beauty divinely given. The years that made it possible for Kant to describe the free play of the imagination, the moment the eye and the mind come upon a work of art and are, however briefly, truly and completely free.

These were the years after which Hegel could imagine that these plastic manipulations could be superseded by social manipulations, that art, free and playful, indicated that human society might be so as well, that we could choose our own destiny and, in so doing, would no longer need to conjure it in paint or discover it in stone.  

Art was the thing that demanded more from life. Around the holes and gaps in an existence that does not satisfy — but perhaps someday might — it bloomed in every color. It whispered: it should be otherwise. “Holy July days of Paris!” Heinrich Heine wrote, “ye who will eternally testify in favor of the original dignity of man — a dignity which ne’er can be destroyed.” He was speaking, of course, of the holy July of 1830, embodied forever by Delacroix in the figure of Liberty, hair blowing in the wind under her Phrygian cap as she raises the tricolore and beckons humanity to its future, striding over the corpses of the dead. 

Here, in this picture, art was and could no longer be of the past. The painter of the 1789 Revolution, Jacques-Louis David, had been compelled still to find his poetry in the ancients, in Socrates and the Horatii. It was he who rescued the past and installed it in the museum, and he, even, who finally put the present to canvas in the dying body of Marat. 

The holy July days did not, as it turned out, liberate humanity. Liberty beckoned the people, but they did not come. It granted only a slightly improved constitutional zombie of the ancien régime. And yet. And yet! “Art blooms more luxuriantly in Paris” says Heine, there in the pit of despair and the height of possibility, art blooms on streets where the poet saw a “deathly pale man fall on the ground on the Boulevards from hunger and wretchedness,” and wrote that as “a whole race falls on the Boulevard of Europe, then it is impossible to write further in peace.” But write he did. And though he worried that “when the eyes of the critic are wet with tears his opinion is not worth much,” it turned out to be worth more, much more, than the dry-eyed language games and conceptual tricks to come.

I have little will to detail the catastrophes that followed. Liberty beckoned and we did not follow. The fact that art is the vanguard of capital is not the problem, certainly not one that can be escaped by decommodifying art, as so many have attempted is recent decades. The problem has more to do with the sluggish stultification of capital and the bureaucratic administration of the image of criticality in art.

There’s an impressive roster of artists attached to this event, many of whom have social impulses: Hank Willis Thomas, Liam Gillick, Rirkrit Tiravanija, Simon Denny, Rachel Rose. This may look like selling out, but crypto does, in its own way, fulfill the desires of Gillick, Tiravanija, and all the relational artists with a New Left aversion to authority and immature utopianism who wished to make art public, and exercised that wish by refusing to create works of art. They were the pure souls who staged participatory actions while Murakami was selling hideous Louis Vuitton bags. Theirs was art that made the job of the critic necessary; each work could occasion 2,000 words in Artforum explaining why it was art, carefully articulating its social import so that another curator with another bureaucratic grant could commission another rendition. It is perfectly fitting that the dream democratization be fulfilled in Decentralized Autonomous Collectives with multi-thousand dollar buy-ins. Capital is perfectly capable of solving its own problems. Existing institutions can be abolished, hierarchies smashed, artworks and commodities evaporated, just don’t expect to be happy with what comes next.

The proof of concept for FIRESALE, one of the guys tells me, will be that the value of the digital in NFT will be equal to or exceed that of the physical artwork bound for the fire. He means this monetarily, of course, which can be conveniently quantified. This seems like cynical decadence, lighting a cigar with a hundred dollar bill at an even larger scale. Why didn’t they just burn a Birkin bag, or cut out the middleman and light up a pile of cash? It’s basically a flip, is it not?

For a crypto activation, the event is surprisingly physical, and the execution strangely similar to art school performances: a bit ad hoc, a bit half-assed, both less and more than the sum of its parts. The bros rallied a small crowd and carried the doomed Murakami outside and set it up on a tripod in a concrete yard. Lighter fluid and a torch were produced. At one point one of the guys nearly lit himself on fire, and I realize, to my horror, that I am watching performance art despite the fact that I’d come here to watch Nero play the fiddle. 

The fact that the 21st century could only think to conjure up post-post pop art and change the colors on some hideous Louis Vuitton bags is unfortunate. Murakami never should have happened but watching even this silly example go up in flames in a circle of crypto bros and burners makes me love it like a broken thing. Those insufferable smiley faces oscillate between tragedy and horror as they melt away. 

The audience is lighting the embers on fire, they’re making sure there’s no future, that nothing will remain, and perhaps we should do this with all of modernity, all of these two tortured centuries, all of this promise of freedom unkept. There is nothing remaining, nothing worth keeping. The children dance around the embers of what they cannot understand and never desired to. 

I can imagine that I have arrived at the situation Hegel pointed to, not won through liberation but lit by sheer despair. To arrive here, at the end of art, to be freed, finally, from the task of forcing a dead thing into life, is a particular form of bliss. It is good that the end of art comes in flames rather than the noise of total experience evacuated of all feeling. In this moronic behavior I can imagine the end of art, I can imagine that it has taken place and I can walk away from here knowing this sad thing has come to an end. As it should be. As it never should have been. It’s a pleasant fantasy.

And yet the bastard remains. It whispers: it should be otherwise. Even here, a line has somehow been traced successfully around what is missing in life and has managed, by accident perhaps, to articulate something true in the form of something utterly pointless. It’s not nothing. Quite literally: by morning the NFT had sold for 4 Ether, which was, at the time of transaction, valued at $17,300.32 US. 

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This essay cribs not insignificantly from Theodor Adorno’s “Commitment” and a bit from T.J. Clark’s “In Defence of Abstract Expressionism.” Everything that can be said has been said before, and usually better the first time around.

More from Caesura Roundtable: The NFT. Bret Schneider on hyperconsonance and hyperbolic hearts.