NFTs, high-brow fury, and the new value of pixels

By Ivar Laanen

Illustration by Cenk Güngör

In January, a French woman was “extremely shocked” to find her former surgeon trying to sell an x-ray of her injury online as a digital NFT artwork. The x-ray, priced at $2,776, shows a Kalashnikov bullet lodged near the bone of her forearm, an injury she obtained during the 2015 Paris attacks where she lost her boyfriend and nearly died herself at the Bataclan Concert Hall. Yes, you read that right.

If the urge to capitalize on the craze for NFTs is strong enough to motivate a senior surgeon to violate medical secrecy in such disturbing fashion, then it’s not so hard to see why so many people resent NFTs. Of course, part of the hate is definitely justifiable: NFTs are known for having a seriously dubious environmental track record, though that’s not actually down to the NFTs themselves but rather the Proof of Work consensus mechanism used by the likes of Etheruem to add NFTs to the blockchain. The “look-how-rich-I-am” social media culture that NFTs accentuate is also a massive turn-off for many folks. And then there’s the bit where a lot of NFT art is computer-generated, which bugs the art traditionalists.

But if you ask us, a big part of the resentment towards NFTs must have to do with a certain kind of FOMO that comes with watching people make millions by selling memes or 24x24-pixel images (see CryptoPunks). As many cash in big-time, the temptation for others to try selling .jpegs for big profits has become too irresistible—just ask the French surgeon. The result of this FOMO is that the Internet is now being flooded with a dizzying number of NFT artworks that have, for better or worse, stolen the limelight from the fine-art world.

Bored Apes, Pudgy Penguins, Chromie Squiggles, CryptoKitties; many of the most profitable NFT collections to date are incredibly gimmicky. Others we’ve found to be quite beautiful and provocative while many more are just objectively stupid: For $6,498, you can buy a .jpeg of a Covid-19 flavored NFT burger. Just two years ago not a single one of us could have made any sense of that last sentence—a true testament to humanity’s rapid descent into unrecognizable absurdity.

NFTs aren’t all bad though. Quite the contrary. With NFTs, the same mechanisms of scarcity and ownership that underpin the fine art market are being used online to make it possible for a new generation of digital artists to fetch similarly absurd amounts of money—and in the process, they have made an amusing mockery of the high-brow arts scene. It’s been a true pleasure to watch art snobs grab the bait as they launch into scathing critiques of NFTs that—pulled from their context—appear to be aimed at themselves.

“What makes this art?”

Ah, here we see an age-old question long whispered by skeptical visitors of modern art exhibitions everywhere. But at the unveiling of a physical NFT exhibition at a town hall meeting in the fine-arts town of Marfa, Texas, the proverbial tables turned. Suddenly, as described in a recent New Yorker piece, it was the high-brow artists asking the question.

“I’m feeling super depressed right now,” said the visual artist Magalie Guérin, staring at a slide show of algorithmically generated art works. “I’m hearing no conversation about criticality. What makes this art?”

“It sounds like you’re talking about art without aesthetics,” added the painter Christopher Wool, whose paintings consist of stenciled words on canvas that could easily pass as an NFT.

Beyond the Marfa town hall meeting, other critics echo similar sentiments towards NFTs.

“No one, I hope, no one is saying these are timeless works of human creation and ingenuity, because they’re just completely trivial as artworks,” said the New York Times art critic Blake Gopnik in an interview with Marketplace.

That Gopnik finds NFTs to be “completely trivial” is fair enough, but then again, this is the same man who just months ago praised a rather ordinary painting of a cow as being “remarkable,” which makes it seem like his frustration is less about the quality of NFT art and more about NFTs overtaking his “world…the serious art world”—as he calls it—in terms of cultural importance. The thing is Gopnik knows too that the fine arts have always been guarded by the wealthy. Their spending habits have essentially determined what is and isn’t considered fine art. But now that a pixelated portrait can go for the same price as a Van Gogh, what does this tell us? That art has changed? That taste has changed?

Sure, to an extent, though digital art has been around since the 1980s. What the rise of NFTs really tells us though is that the class of people who are rich enough to splurge on art has changed. We are talking mainly about the new crypto-elite, the people who—for the most part—didn’t grow up in the old money lifestyle. They don’t care about owning a Baroque masterpiece. No, they love Dune, they love video games and psychedelics and Internet memes. They’d much rather display these things in the digital domain where they socialize rather than hang a Rothko in their hallway. What’s happening with the rise of NFTs is that the new elite is using the wealth crypto has allowed them to buy art that reflects their taste and lifestyle more while supporting a whole new generation of artists.

That high-brow art critics and collectors are up in arms about the towering figures that something like Beeple’s 5000 days fetched is the amusing, ironic bit. After all, the practice of paying absurd amounts of money for a piece was normalized by high-brow collectors. Take Mark Rothko’s “Untitled, (Yellow and Blue)”: To the untrained eye it may look like a child’s rendition of the Ukrainian flag and was sold for a casual $46.5 million. What determines the value of the particular piece? Is it determined by the material value of the piece? That is, the value of the dried paint and paper that make up the painting? The answer is no. What determines the monetary value is what’s behind the painting when you flip it over—the certificate of authenticity that indicates that the painting is in fact a genuine, original Rothko, and not just a copy. Without that track record (and the backstory that the certificate guarantees as being true), the painting is worth little.

Now NFTs have borrowed this same notion, using the immutability of the blockchain to indicate a file is in fact the original and not just a right-click-and-save copy. This allows NFT owners to claim that they have the original (in the same way high-brow collectors do) while giving digital artists the chance to make money in a world where digital goods are so often pirated.

“People who buy NFTs, or NFT-based art, just want to know that they’ve got the real version of the rainbow cat video that a million other people just have copies of,” says Gopnik. “But, of course, they’re not copies, they’re exactly the same thing. So people are spending all this money just on these certificates, on these non-fungible tokens, that tell people that you’ve got the real thing. But the real thing isn’t real in any real way.”

Gopnik isn’t wrong, but does it really matter? Have museum goers ever known what’s real? It’s not uncommon for museums to commission artists to make exact copies of their really expensive art pieces and hang them on the wall just so they can safely store the valuable original and its certificate in a vault. The Mona Lisa you see in the Louvre is exactly that: a copy. In the end, the value lies in the certificate. The paper trail.

We agree with Gopnik on the absurdity of this fetishization for authenticity, but where we diverge is on the cultural value of NFTs. He and other high-brows hope no one will regard them as “timeless works of human ingenuity.” We see endless possibilities. We see the imagination running away like Robin Hood, siphoning money away from the gated fine-art community and spreading it amongst a whole different class of artists—many of whom have long been marginalized from the world of high-brow art. Already we are seeing black artists making figures that were never possible before the so-called non-fungible token was created.

Though the NFT space itself deserves some of the ridicule it gets, NFT art itself doesn’t deserve to be written off. But as Genghis Khan said, there will always be haters. The street art movement of the early 2000s featuring artists like Space Invader and Banksy was disregarded at first, and we all know how that went. Now NFTs have taken over the scene—and while we should be wary of their environmental toll and the potential for fraudulent behavior, we’re thankful that NFTs have made it so that the value of pixels is no longer being held down by high-arts obsession for paint on paper. For digital artists, that’s the greatest opportunity there is.