Nfts
Book Review: “Token Supremacy” – Book and Film Globe
In Symbolic supremacy, Zachary Small chronicles the meteoric rise and spectacular fall of the NFT market and its associated artists, collectors, and parasites. Despite this segment of art market with a turnover in the billions between March 2021 and October 2022, many of you may still be unfamiliar with NFTs. It’s good. Some of the people most closely associated with the form don’t fully understand it either.
NFT stands for “non-fungible token”. An NFT is a piece of digital art or digital cultural detritus whose ownership can be tracked as an asset. The digital image becomes an NFT when someone creates it on the blockchain, a digital system of recorded transactions kept on computers linked in a peer-to-peer network. Blockchain is also the most common home of cryptocurrency, which aspires to become a decentralized financial system. This means that there is no single form of authority, a role traditionally played by banks.
In short, if you own a piece of art that someone has turned into an NFT, you have a unique and verifiable digital piece. Think about the last meme you saw. Now imagine owning the “original” of this meme. That’s more or less the appeal of NFTs. Such a rare work has value for a limited number of collectors, and from this value a new art market was born.
But this isn’t your parents’ art market, as Small Chronicles tells it. The original art depicted in the most famous of these digital currencies – cartoonish monkeys, crypto-punks, wavy lines – receives far less respect than the Rembrandts and Moneys of yesteryear. Their value is, on the whole, more directly related to what you can get for them – whether in Bitcoin or conventional currency – than anything to do with the aesthetic of the work. Reading Small’s book, an outsider might get the impression that an NFT worth $100 is virtually always better than an NFT worth $99 and worse than an NFT worth value of $101.
Small insightfully connects this focus on dollars to an evolution in the meaning of the word “priceless.” “Masterpieces were supposed to be incomparable and therefore incapable of being judged in the economic terms of the market.” In other words, you couldn’t put a price on it. But tell the insurance company you want to cover your Picasso with. “Priceless,” in this context, means a certain number, although sometimes very, very high.
When we start putting price tags on subjective works, it opens the door to everything being seen as worth something. Many, if not most, NFT collectors don’t seem to think much about the works they collect. The “Degens,” short for “degenerates,” as some collectors call themselves, see this lack of interest in the work itself not as a bug but as a characteristic of the market. There are no haughty people with their noses in the air talking about what this or that piece is supposed to yield – unless of course that discussion adds to the monetary value. In other words, tell me how much it’s worth, and I’ll let you know if I’m interested.
Of course, no one thinks that the traditional art market is not money-driven. According to Small, “over the past forty years, the contemporary art market has served as an economic laboratory for the wealthy to develop a shadow banking system of alternative assets and covered liquidity.” The NFT market takes this unfortunate quality to a new level. Overall, Small’s book makes clear that the NFT art buyer cares even less about the art than the conventional buyer, and that’s saying something.
This quality creates a tense relationship between collectors and visual artists who made their fortune during the NFT bubble. Artist Mike Winkelmann seems most determined to move beyond the miracle aspect of his $69 million gain from the sale of his work in March 2021 via NFT. He would prefer to continue his career as an artist about whom one day we will perhaps speak in hushed tones. Small reports that Winkelmann consolidated his auction winnings in a 50,000-square-foot art studio in South Carolina. “I am now focusing on legacy” [Winkelmann] said. “This is the real shit that people won’t care about in about two hundred years. Who cares about a stupid auction anymore? I don’t care.'”
Of course, if these NFT auctions broke financial records again, Winkelmann might regain the ability to care. By the summer of 2022, a year and a change after Winkelmann had his big night, “the once-booming non-fungible token market has deflated by nearly 97% of its record volume,” according to Small. For Winkelmann and others, moving on was clearly an easy decision. He was already a millionaire. Why not opt for the same obstacles as Michelangelo?
What is more concerning since the NFT crash of 2022 is the number of people who have seen much of their financial value disappear. Small describes the pride the degens took in placing so much faith in the market, doing what they believed was necessary to establish a new financial system, which ended up emptying their accounts. Many don’t want your sympathy. They made their bets and lost, and that’s fine with them. Americans were trying to grab the next big thing long before the Gold Rush. There will be another opportunity, and I suspect these people – or people like them – will be waiting for it. Next time, feel free to skip the art and go straight to the money.
(Button, May 21)