Is NFT a new Medium for Appropriation?
(For those unfamiliar with NFTs, I recommend reading the previous post on the basics of NFTs before continuing with this post).
Good artists copy, great artists steal.
-Pablo Picasso
The recent resurgence of NFTs has been raising ethical and philosophical questions on originality, authenticity of authorship, and the value of art. The controversies around NFTs are not new to the art world. The artists have been challenging the notion and definition of art throughout centuries and further blurring the lines when we introduced technology in the mix.
As the art world is quickly jumping on the bandwagon on NFTs and embracing blockchain technology, 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 removes 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). Likewise, NFTs' ability to create scarcity on digital or non-tangible assets radically shifted our interpretations of value, authorship, and ownership.
Before the emergence of NFTs, Appropriation Art has created controversies and challenged the work's traditional idea of originality and authenticity. Throughout the ages, artists have been adopting, borrowing, recycling, reproducing, and imitating, partially or in the entirety of their predecessors or contemporaries' work. Appropriation Art, generally re-contextualizes the source to create an entirely new form. However, in most cases, the original 'thing' remains accessible as the original, without edits, and artists usually used them as critiques to illustrate aspects of our culture and society.
When it comes to art historical analysis, we often trace the inspiration or influences behind masterpieces. It is a common practice for aspiring artists to learn from the masters through apprenticeships or study masterpieces by copying. In the 19th Century, artists such as Vincent Van Gogh made references to the past or other cultural influences. In 1889, Van Gogh created 20 paintings based on Jean-Francois Millet's black-and-white prints, where he focused part of the compositions of the prints and then painted them in his signature color palettes. In his letters, Van Gogh admits copying from another artist where he compares the act of Appropriation as a performer who "plays some Beethoven, he'll add his personal interpretation to it… it isn't a hard and fast rule that only the composer plays his own compositions." (Read more here).
Likewise, avant-garde modernists in the 20th Century extended Appropriation practice, invented new forms, and expanded the possibilities for art. Cubists artists Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque also adapted Appropriation in their collage and pastiche paintings, taking fragmented images from newspapers to create abstracted forms. Marcel Duchamp's infamous sculpture, Fountain (1917), took one step further where he transformed a urinal into a sculpture by turning it upside down, signing "R. Mutt," and placing it on a pedestal. Duchamp's Fountain and his readymades radically shifted our perception of art and value when he re-contextualized the ordinary objects into new forms and removed their original function.
Picasso's definition of a "great" artist was more relevant when copyrights were less restrictive and made it effortless for artists to "steal" from one another. Copyright laws before 1976 had a shorter life span, and it was only applicable to literary works, motion pictures, and sound recordings. The new trends in art and technology bring more skepticism and concerns when la claim that the past or someone's work inspired their work. Many "great" artists, such as Andy Warhol and Richard Prince, ran into lawsuits during their careers. For example, Warhol met a series of lawsuits from photographers whose work he appropriated and silk-screened. Without her permission, Warhol covered Leo Castelli's New York gallery walls with his silk-screened reproductions of Patricia Caulfield's photograph in 1964. After seeing his unauthorized reproductions poster in a bookstore, Caulfield sued Warhol for copyright infringement, and Warhol ended up a cash settlement out of court. On the other hand, Warhol's famous Campbell's Soup Cans series were less controversial since his paintings were considered not a competing product and generally understood that his works were not represented or sponsored by Campbell's.
Pictures Generations artist Richard Prince is known for re-photographing ubiquitous and annymous advertisements of Marlboro cigarettes or photo-journalism shots. Prince's works have been controversial as they hover over the borderlines of "mechanically reproduced" art and copyright infringement.
Prince's work makes an interesting case study for Benjamin's definition of "aura" and extended Appropriation themes further by leveraging social media for his 2014 exhibition," New Portraits," where he showcased 38 portraits at the Gagosian gallery in New York City. Prince took each image of models, artists, and celebrities from his Instagram feed and added comments such as, "Don't du anything. Just B Urself © ®". The copyright and registered trademark symbols in his comments as a way to claim some form of authorship. In 2015, Prince also made headlines (here and here) for selling these portraits for profit at the Frieze Art Fair, where these large-scale Instagram feeds and comments sold for $100,000 each.
So what do these historical precedents of Appropriations have to do with NFTs? Just as Appropriation Art, NFTs liberate art from traditional concepts such as aura, originality, and genius, leading to new possibilities and expansion of Joseph Beuys' vision of "everyone is an artist" and "free societies."
So, where do we draw the line between authenticity and Appropriation in NFTs? The lack of authority in a decentralized world has invited more controversies, artists' moral and copyright violations. The technology makes it even more accessible and easy for people to steal other's intellectual properties. Recent unauthorized minting of works of established artists, Banksy and Jean-Michel Basquiat, illustrate that imitation is not flattery, and no artists are immune to copyright infringements. What's even more absurd in Basquiat's case is that the sponsors of the illegitimate NFT attempted to give exclusive IP rights indefinitely to the highest bidder and the option to destroy the physical work to retain the value and longevity of the NFT version. Fortunately, the Estate of Jean-Michel Basquiat intervened, and the work was pulled off from the OpenSea platform.
Although the optimism and benefits of NFTs are promising, the wild Wild West of blockchain still makes the creators' intellectual properties and moral rights vulnerable. While the decentralized technology operates without authority, the artists or estates still need to intervene and validate the artwork's authenticity to prevent fraudulent minting, as was the case for Basquiat. Thus as we experiment, learn and navigate the unregulated NFT space, we need to make further adjustments to ensure that artists’ rights are protected.
(Disclaimer: All ideas and commentaries presented in this post are for information only. These are not legal or financial advice.)