Are NFTs Art?: The Past, Present, and Future of Art
Originally written on January 30, 2022, which became the inspiration for NFT.NYC 2023 solo presentation here.
The recent Wikipedia editors' decision not to include NFT artists Beeple (known for his NFT titled, Everyday: First 1,000 Days for $69 million at Christie’s in March 2021) and Pak (recently sold 266,445 Shares of an NFT for $91.8 Million on Nifty Gateway) on their list of highest artworks ever sold by living artists sparked a debate among the Crypto and art communities, especially on Twitter and Discord. In art world terms, this debate is equivalent to an artist foundation not including their artist's work in their catalogue raisonné because of its questionable authenticity and provenance. In addition, Wikipedia's decision raises some moral and philosophical questions about what is and who gets to decide what art is and isn't.
Undoubtedly, 2021 was the year of NFTs, and now it has become mainstream. Even Collins dictionary declared NFT as the word of the year at the end of last year. As NFTs are becoming more mainstream and refining their protocols and best practices, we have come to a point where we are expanding another art movement in our history. As we've observed in the last two years, NFTs have radically and rapidly changed the paradigm of art history in the 21st Century as the major auction houses and blue-chip art galleries quickly adapted and integrated emerging technologies in the art market.
MAJOR BREAKTHROUGHS IN (ART) HISTORY: A HIGHLIGHT
If history serves as a guide and lesson, artists have challenged and shaped the idea of beauty, value, and concept of art throughout the ages. Our current debate with Wikipedia recalls the advent of photography as a medium in the late 19th Century. When photography was first introduced, it wasn't considered art because it was too "mechanical" and removed the artist from the creative process of making art. Walter Benjamin's famous essay, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (1934), immediately comes to mind, where his thoughts on technology and art still reverberate today. According to Benjamin, the rapid mass-production of technology diminish the "aura" or "uniqueness" of the art as the reproductions lack specific "time and space" and remove the originals from their context. He also predicted that the value as a society shifts when the artworks move away from private (religious sites/homes) to the public sphere (museums/internet). Photography as a new medium evolved into NFTs in today's terms--its ability to create scarcity on digital or non-tangible assets radically shifted our interpretations of value, authorship, and ownership.
Marcel Duchamp's infamous and influential work, Fountain (1917), presented another controversy in the art world when he submitted his readymade sculpture for the inaugural Society of Independent Artists' exhibition in NYC. Although the Society didn't "reject" the work for the exhibit, it was removed for its provocative statement and object. Duchamp's Fountain comprises a urinal turned upside down and bore a pseudonym signature, "R. Mutt, 1917," and placed on a pedestal. Fountain thus opened new possibilities in art where the object is removed from its original context and the artist is responsible for their idea and removed from the creation of the material itself. Nevertheless, the concept of "readymade" set the stage for new possibilities in art--gave rise to thought-provoking art movements such as Pop-Art, Minimalism, and Conceptual Art in the 1960s and 1970s.
Like Bitcoin's inventor, Satoshi Nakamoto, whose work has shifted the economic paradigm and whose identity remains a mystery (some speculate it's an entity rather than an individual), Fountain's origin is also debatable. A letter from Duchamp to his sister Suzanne (dated April 11, 1917) raises speculation about its original creator: "One of my female friends under a masculine pseudonym, Richard Mutt, sent in a porcelain urinal as a sculpture." Duchamp never identified his female friend, but scholars have proposed Rrose Sélavy, Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, and Louise Norton. If the original creator of this readymade sculpture's identity is confirmed, this can also change the dynamics of women artists' place in art history. However, as of now, Duchamp solely retains the authorship of Fountain.
So what do these past events in art history tell us about the future of art and NFTs? Though no one can predict the future, history offers some patterns to help us determine and (re)shape the future. As the new generation of artists pushes the boundaries of the form and idea of art, they always go through some form of criticism or resistance and a learning curve before the innovations become the "norm." Just as the beauty is the eye of the beholder, the definition of art and artists are becoming more of a game of semantics. The moral of the story is that we are all still navigating and honing the proper practices of the emerging technology whether we agree NFTs are art or not. We all know that NFTs aren’t going away anytime soon.