SCARECROW: You promised us real things — a real brain!
TIN MAN: A real heart!
LION: Real courage. That’s what we want.
WIZARD: You do? Boys, you’re aiming low. You not only surprise, but you grieve me.
—The Wizard of Oz, 19391
The first step in that journey, in turn, is to accept that in the largest scheme of things, just as no one has the right to tell us our true value, no one has the right to tell us what we truly owe.
—David Graeber2
All you need to know about NFTs is balled up in one scene at the end of The Wizard of Oz, a movie made for children based on a book written a hundred years ago. Perhaps you recall the major plot-points? The Scarecrow wants knowledge; the Tin-man, the power to love; the Lion, courage. The Wizard understands that they already possess these powers — they just don’t have a certificate memorializing them. What the Wizard doesn’t know, or at least doesn’t say, is that certificates do things that intelligence, love, and courage can’t. They can be bestowed, withheld, exchanged, and exercised. They are the titles that allow privileges to the entitled; they are durable while feats, no matter how grand, are fleeting. Dorothy’s pals understand that only certificates will open doors in a world run by wizards. They consider their own value, without diplomas, citations, and medals: essentially worthless. So when the Wizard scoffs at their needs, they demand to have their fleeting gestures redeemed by “real things.” They mean things more durable than bravery, love, and wisdom.
They mean cryptocurrency.
Blockchain is a big public ledger. Fundamentally, that ledger can track anything,3 but it has succeeded with the ledgers of currency: bitcoin, ether, vibranium,4 unobtainium,5 and other magical substances that exist only within the ledger. The artworld fiddled with applications for this nifty public-ledger device, but those experiments were built on the art market’s same founding myth that had existed for at least a century: these are important objects, scarce by difficulty and desirable by design, and so they are expensive. The attempts to graft blockchain onto that idea were just dog-collars: if you found, please return this painting to so-and-so. The tricky part was keeping the collar on the dog.
The basic premise of the artwork remained intact. Beautiful, difficult to make or copy, and physically within the custody of its owner — an artwork is its own testament of value. A public ledger is not only irrelevant, it works against a collector’s desire to transact quietly, and against a dealer’s desire to own the knowledge of where valuable objects are. Worse than being bad skin grafts, these early blockchain incursions into the artworld threatened the gallery model.
Unsurprisingly, these dog-collars didn’t catch on.
But there was another notion that had been growing in the darkness for sometime, and it was more awesome than a dog-collar. Walking through the Julie Mehretu show at the Whitney, the artist and musician Marissa Paternoster put it to me this way: “I finally figured out that NFTs are just the realization that all of this stuff is a social construct — money just has value because we all agree it does, and maybe it’s possible to awaken from that collective daydream.”6 Paternoster’s visual art describes a lonely and unsettling world, but she lamented, as we walked past the lyrical explosions of Mehtretu’s massive drawings, that her career as a performing musician had been put on furlough by the global pandemic.
“You were ranked the 77th greatest guitarist of all time,” I offered in consolation. “Surely people locked at home are still buying your records?”
She explained to me that, while it’s nice to be liked and to be on lists, because of the internet, music today is basically free. Musicians make a living by playing, and playing, and playing, and if that is interrupted, say, by a nation-wide ban on public gatherings, there’s no real recourse. A minor bloom in vinyl sales notwithstanding, people just don’t pay for physical objects anymore. We wandered up to the Whitney’s permanent collection, past strands of yarn hanging from the ceiling, a pair of logs leaning up against a wall, and an artist’s kitchen recreated in beaded, full-size replica. There was something in it for our meandering talk about value. Everything can be art, from this crumpled steel to the kitchen sink. If this is what winds up in museums, surely anything is permissible.
Paternoster lit up as we moved through the detritus — if there is a nihilism in this vast permissibility, she doesn’t share it. The doors are open to new forms of expression, new voices that hadn’t had a venue, and even the possibility to critique the Old Guard on the way into the castle. The anthropologist David Graeber, who died last year, took a similarly optimistic view of this permissibility. A key figure in the Occupy Wall Street movement, Graeber wrote a book on the concept of debt that stressed the shakiness of its moral foundations.7 The promissory note feels very concrete when your home is being foreclosed on, but when it can be forgiven with a few keystrokes, it starts to look — well, at least negotiable, if not an outright fiction.
That sentiment captures a suspicion that has been brooding in many realms for most of a century: money, art, identity, education, medicine, liberty — all of these things have no bedrock reality to them — they are just conventions, and conventions are subject to total and continuous renegotiation.
This is a foundational premise of NFTs: art can be anything; art can be nothing. And as long as you have an identifying token of that nothing, you can trade it in just the same way as you trade a painting, except easier.
Well, not quite nothing: the NFT has to be embedded in some sort of intellectual property, however minimal. The race has been to see just how minimal that IP could be: so far, a single gray pixel is the limit.8 Go past that and you’d still have a bit of blockchain-supported value, but it would just be cryptocurrency: it wouldn’t be art anymore.
“Anymore.” I can already feel my inbox filling with hate-mail.
I don’t mind calling NFTs art. They are already being sold in fine art auctions, joining the collections of traditional collectors along with those of GameStop-style speculators, and they will be in museum collections. They perform one of the functions of great art: to hold up a mirror to our times. Stare for a moment at a gray pixel or a clip of Lebron James dunking and you have a view of the hubris, excess, nihilism and despair of our moment. Don’t hate the mirror if you don’t like what you see.
In the popular imagination, it’s just a step further down a long and weird path. From the advent of modernism to the urinal as a sculpture to John Cage’s silent music and Agnes Martin’s invisible paintings, to a shark in formaldehyde to a banana peel duct-taped to a wall in Miami: the sport of viewing art in the last century has been to go to see what’s expensive this season. From that vantage point, NFTs are just this year’s banana-peel. Careful not to slip on it.
When you peel apart the art-object from the art-idea, it reveals how famous artworks hold their value. Starry Night is represented everywhere — in imitation, on coffee-mugs, in songs, on the internet — but you have to go to MoMA to actually see it. The idea is everywhere but the thing is only one place, and the super-circulation of the idea is how the object achieves a value in the public imagination. All ways of saying the same thing: it is advertised, goes viral, or exerts its cultural impact.
NFTs have a problem here. Because the idea and the object are the same thing, one cannot advertise for the other. If the token is one place, then it can’t be everyplace; if it’s everyplace, then it can’t be locked up in a vault.9 Don McLean helps ensure that Starry Night is timeless,10 but who will sing Charlie Bit My Finger’s song?11
And anyway, what is it worth?
Because that’s where the switch took place. In old times, the artwork was valuable because of the properties of the object itself. You might gawk at the price tag and wonder if the market-price matches the meaning-value, but you know which came first. Now the artwork is an artwork because it is valuable. The market not only gives the NFT its meaning, it gives it its entire existence: an NFT cannot exist except in the matrix that is the blockchain ledger. The art not only goes straight to auction, it comes into existence at the point of sale. The artist doesn’t make it art: the market is instrumental in its creation.
That’s a 180-degree flip, and I’m not sure people getting in on the ground floor appreciate that. To really believe in NFTs, you have to hold two contradictory thoughts in your mind. You must believe that the value of art is strictly social, and not built upon the properties of the art object. And you must believe that NFTs have properties that are worth investing in. You have to believe that the market is a fiction, and then you have to invest in the market.
“Boys,” said the Wizard, “You not only surprise, you grieve me . . . You are the victim of disorganized thinking.” The Lion, the Scarecrow, the Tin-Man: they sought something real, something more real than their fleeting gestures. They unmasked the Wizard as a powerless little man hiding behind a curtain, but he bought back their fealty on the cheap, with freshly-printed certificates.
This is the artworld we have inherited: riddled with breathless skepticism and strangely-placed faith. For a century, there has been lively debate about what an artwork is, and the stakes of that debate have animated the question of who gets to decide. Dealers, curators, and public and private patrons have played their parts, but ultimately the people who have determined what counts as art are artists. But who decides who the artists are? America has proposed a series of hesitant answers, but ultimately all have gotten their Nobody Gets to See the Wizard moment. Does the work certify the artist, or does the certificate license the work?
Is now the right time to buy an NFT? From the long perspective on the art market, buying a non-fungible token isn’t much different from buying new, untested art at any time in the past decades. Some goes up; some goes down. Over those decades, the increasingly immaterial artwork has climbed like a stalagmite toward the descending stalactite of its increasingly corporeal diploma. The more interesting question is how they grew so close that today’s art market can pass across the gap without feeling gravity flip.
The seeds of radical skepticism have been growing for a long time, alongside seeds of radical certainty. NFTs are a strange collision point between the two, but to understand them we have to look back to the fields in which those seeds were planted.
Because in the heartland of America in the 1930s, competing visions of the future of the artworld were building their cases. These visions not only represented novel modes of artistic expression, with different business models to support them — and different ways of viewing. One thing these visions had in common was transcending East Coast modernism — toward a Midwestern Futurism.
Next Week: Kansas, She Says, Is the Name of the Star: How Hollywood Became Capital of the Artworld.
Hanging Papers is a long look at the value of art in America — a history of value that leads us up to the present moment and informs decision-making around collecting today. Each week we’ll dig deep into a turning point in American art history — a revolution in medium, meaning, market — with an eye to today and tomorrow. You can read them in order of publication for a coherent narrative, or as topics interest you for a scattershot view; each article is written to be comprehensible to the average enthusiast either way. There’s one free article a month and paid subscribers get a new article every week as well as full access to the archive. Questions and suggestions for articles of interest are welcome. Sincere thanks for your support!
Jonathan
jonathan@jonathanmillerspies.com
The Wizard of Oz, 1939, Noel Langley, Florence Ryerson and Edgar Allen Woolf, based on the book by L. Frank Baum.
David Graeber, Debt: The First 5,000 Years, New York: Melville, 2011, p. 390.
Ethereum’s homebase puts it more expansively: “Anything you can own can be represented, traded and put to use as non-fungible tokens (NFTs). You can tokenise your art and get royalties automatically every time it's re-sold. Or use a token for something you own to take out a loan.” Fascinating: I can even use NFTs to go into debt. What a country!
Jonathan Miller Spies Fine Art LLC represents the fine visual artwork of Marissa Paternoster.
Remember that time Wu-Tang made only one copy of their new album and sold it to one person, and that person was Martin Shkreli, “the most hated man in America” for two million dollars? All well and good if you’re already Wu-Tang in 2015, but Wu-Tang in 1993 could not have sold 36 Chambers that way for two hundred dollars.
Don McLean’s version is nice, and NoFX covered it too.
It's funny that you start off with a quote from Graeber because reading (a few pages) of Debt is what inspired me to buy some Ethereum a few years ago. A few months later I sold them at $40 each for a 100% return on my investment, cementing my status as a financial genius.
NFTs without IP rights attached seem a bit ridiculous to me, but then again I suppose if I buy a Warhol I can't monetize that either unless I sell it to someone else.
You briefly mention the banana with duct-tape, but fail to mention that it's essentially an NFT using old technology. When you buy the artwork, you are not buying the banana or the duct-tape. You are buying certified instructions for assembling the artwork elsewhere.