Cryptoart or Crypto art?

In January 2018 Jason Bailey published a post on his popular art and tech blog Artnome entitled ‘What is CryptoArt?’ where he declared that ‘art native to the blockchain has its own aesthetic and represents a new and important movement within art. I call this movement/aesthetic CryptoArt’ (Bailey 2018). Bailey coined the term as one word, perhaps to emphasize the binding connection between what he defines as ‘art’ and the blockchain, I prefer to use two words to underline the possibility that not all Crypto art is art. He went on to list a series of factors common to most Crypto art works and their aesthetic, it is worth quoting such list at length:

1. Digitally Native: For the first time, artwork can be created, editioned, bought, and sold digitally.

2. Geographically Agnostic: Empowered by the internet, artists participate from all over the world. CryptoArt is the first truly global art movement.

3. Democratic/Permissionless: Everyone is encouraged to participate regardless of skills, training, class, gender, race, age, creed, etc.

4. Decentralized: Tools and guidelines are designed to reduce the power of gatekeepers and middlemen and increase the autonomy of artists.

5. Anonymous: Use of pseudonyms allows artists to create and sell art while staying anonymous (if preferred), freeing them from social judgment.

6. Memetic: CryptoArt are often literally memes valued for their ability to spread quickly …

7. Self-Referential: CryptoArtists often play with references to key events and personalities within cryptocurrency and blockchain culture.

8. CryptoPatrons: CryptoArt is collected by the CryptoRich: a group of savvy technologists and investors who got into cryptocurrency early.

9. Pro-Artist: Blockchain platforms often take little to no commission from artists. Artists are often remunerated for every future sale of a single work.

10. Dankness: Because CryptoArt is open to everyone, judging it by traditional artistic standards kills what is great about it. Instead, it is best to judge CryptoArt by ‘dankness’ or potency of expression and creativity (Bailey 2018, bold in the original).

This is a very useful enumeration of Crypto art attributes, however one might argue that not all are unique to the movement. For example, anonymity is not an exclusive prerogative of Crypto art (point 5) but of other artistic expressions as well, and while everyone is encouraged to participate (point 3) the NFTs market is dominated by white, young male artists in the Global North,⁹ also self-referentiality (point 7) is not exclusive to Crypto art and one fails to grasp the substantial difference between CryptoPatrons, CryptoRich (point 8) and the rich patrons which have traditionally collected fine art. As for point 9, blockchain fees, also called gas fees, they fluctuate from very little to a few hundred dollars, thus making it difficult for struggling artists to pay upfront in order to ‘mint’ their work (minting an NFT = creating an NFTs, that is uploading it to the blockchain). In fairness, projects like Mintfund (https://themint.fund/) can help artists with gas fees, work is listed on marketplace servers and fees are paid only when it is bought by a collector (this process is known as ‘lazy minting’). Lastly, (point 10), ‘dankness’, a term originating from meme culture and meaning cool, unique, seems the perfect escamotage to provide crypto creations with a free ‘art’ pass, thus one wonders whether art is always the most appropriate term to define creative works produced on the blockchain, more on crypto aesthetics later.

In his blog post Bailey also identifies two main categories of ‘CryptoArtists’, the Tech Savvy and the Self-trained, to the first category belong the creators of early NFTs like Crypto Kitties and Crypto Punks, as for the latter one, Baileys emphasises the empowering potential for artists to acquire new skills, a potential facilitated by creative technology platforms like Dada.nyc (Bailey 2018).

Two years after Bailey’s influential post (a long time in the NFTs world!), Beatriz Helena Ramos, a professionally trained artist and one of the founders of Dada.nyc published an article provocatively entitled ‘The Complacency of Crypto Art’ (Ramos 2020). The article starts with the following quote by Judy Mam, cofounder of Dada.nyc, ‘Blockchain feels like it’s either the wild west or the Renaissance,’ which captures the deep seated (ideological) dichotomy at play in the Crypto art movement, renewal and change versus a speculative gold rush. For Ramos the movement should firmly be about the former, a position held since her keynote at the 2018 Ethereal Summit, where she emphatically warned: ‘We have an opportunity to not fuck it up this time’ (Ramos 2020). Only two years on and it looks like that opportunity has been squandered to the point that Ramos concedes, ‘Crypto art has become precisely what it claimed to disrupt: a crypto version of the conventional art market’. To prove her point she mentions the case of the Museum of Crypto Art (https://app.museumofcryptoart.com/collection) which had bought a transparent pixel for $15,000 from an artist with a large following on Twitter, this ‘may be exactly the kind of museum we deserve. But is it the kind of museum we intended?’ (Ramos 2020) – most recently, in April 2021, an NFT titled The Pixel by Pak and consisting of a single grey pixel was auctioned at Sotheby’s for $1.36 million.

Ramos is not interested in questions of aesthetics, or as she puts it, ‘whether pixels are good or bad art’, a point I would argue is still worthy of interest because ‘what is a stake in the debate over aesthetics is that … without a frame of reference on which all parties agree, those who control the market will invariably determine what constitutes crypto art itself, and therefore who gets excluded’ (Estorick, Waters, and Diamond 2021). What Ramos cares about are the artists, so in writing her article she was hoping to help ‘reframe the conversation away from an expensive pixel to how we can really do things differently than the art market’ (Ramos 2020). From her perspective what is killing the ‘greatness’ of Crypto art is not, to quote Bailey, ‘judging it by traditional artistic standards’, but Crypto art’s own business model.

Ramos is not the only artist/creative technologist who is critical of crypto culture, in an interview with Evgeny Morozov, chief curator of the crypto syllabus (https://the-crypto-syllabus.com/background/), a set of resources launched in December 2021 with the aim ‘to enrich the global critical conversation about all things crypto’, artist Geraldine Juárez stated in no uncertain terms: ‘crypto is decidedly a right wing conservative project and part of this process of recuperation required for capital to continuously transform and expand. This too is always an aesthetic process, and is why the critique of the political aesthetics of the blockchain is essential’ (Morozov 2021a). Juárez’s words bring to mind Benjamin’s famous thesis that ‘the logical result of fascism is the introduction of aesthetics into political life’ (Benjamin 1936) – in Nazi Germany or Fascist Italy culture entertained the individual with the illusion that certain spaces were beyond politics. Crypto-capitalism provides the artist, art collector, cryptocurrency investor with the utopian dream of the ‘Big Sale’ or the ‘quick buck’ thanks to a technology, the blockchain, located ‘outside’ society and politics. It is as if the price to pay for individual financial emancipation were the loss of any form of social contract (to be replaced by the blockchain equivalent of ‘smart contracts’).¹⁰ Also Juárez observes that ‘the idea that decentralization of infrastructure [a cornerstone of the blockchain system] equals decentralization of power is a trap’,¹¹ by positing ‘decentralization’ as ‘the new democratization’ a dangerous ideological ambiguity is set in place, the values of the left and the right overlap until any distinctiveness is lost. In conclusion, NFTs are:

The capitalised aura is, for Juárez, evidence that capital corrupts a potentially revolutionary technology. Keeping up the Benjamin inspired critique, in an article entitled ‘The Work of Art in the Age of the Non-Fungible Token’, philosopher Tom Whyman suggests that,

All would lead us to believe that the aura is back, however, ‘The tokens might be non-fungible: but the art (or similar) that any given NFT is associated with remains just as reproducible as it was before … on the blockchain, art is stripped of all its old value: all that was once sacred melted down into crypto’ (Whyman 2021). Perhaps, he speculates, ‘NFTs could be considered to involve something like what Benjamin calls ritual value – even if this is not something they are restoring to the art itself’, before concluding,

Or perhaps, as Gopnik (2021) writes, ‘the NFT craze encapsulates the absurdity of the art world – and its obsession with authenticity’, and so he ponders, ‘the purveyors of NFT art are actually working … as conceptual artists drawing attention to the absurdity of authenticity and exclusivity in the digital domain. Does it matter that they don’t know it?’ (Gopnik 2021). 

The answer to Gopnik’s question is that it would matter if they cared to know, in fact the purveyors of NFT art might learn from the cautionary tale of conceptual artists before them who, for all their criticism of the bureaucracies of capitalism, ‘failed to subvert the system against which they sought to position themselves’ (Zeilinger in Catlow et al. 2017, 294).

The age of the Flatulent Aura

Adorno might have had a point when he thought that mechanical reproduction didn’t necessarily dispel the aura, and ‘that technology would enable the growth of an aura around artwork, leading art to be more commodified. The more reproduced the work, the more desirable and valued the original became’ (Geczy 2021). Thus, it happens that in January 2022, 61 years after Piero Manzoni produced 90 cans of Artist’s shit, one finds NFTs for the audio recording of fart noises auctioned on the blockchain (for 0.05 ETH = 188.31$). The project, apparently inspired by Covid19 ‘boredom creativity’, is described as:

The NFTs farts produced by Brooklyn-based film maker Alex Ramírez-Mallis and friends might echo Manzoni’s series of balloons sold as Artist’s Breath (1960) – a work perhaps influenced by Duchamp’s readymade ampoule – however they do lack their subversiveness and, most importantly their anti-art critique, they are lads’ pranks for sale on the blockchain. Fortunately, Manzoni’s artistic legacy has not gone up in the ‘ether’ entirely, Cassils – a Guggenheim Award-winning, transgender, Canadian–American performance artist (https://www.cassils.net/) – produced in July 2021 an NFT art project called $HT Coin that is ‘a complex questioning of how art engages with consumption, and particularly NFTs’ (Silva 2021). 

The project was launched anonymously as ‘White Male Artist’ and comprised of a performative and a visual element. The performative element included Cassils eating a series of meals based on the diets of financially successful white male artists. They then pooped into tin cans and put those cans on display at 432 Park Avenue (Silva 2021). The cans were auctioned on the Ethereum blockchain over 24 hours, and each had a digital companion in the form of NFTs. In the interview with Silva (2021) Cassils admits that they were initially intrigued by the emancipatory potential of the new blockchain technology, however enthusiasm soon turned into disillusionment, as they explain,

For Cassils the ‘notion that 98 percent of successful artists in this world today, are cis men … begs the question, who are the remaining 2 percent? Are they just women? … what about the rest of us? Where is the room for that kind of inclusion?’ (Silva 2021). More on inclusivity and NFTs below. 

If one posits, as art historian David Joselit (2021) did, that while ‘Duchamp used the category of art to liberate materiality from commodifiable form; the NFT deploys the category of art to extract private property from freely available information’, then it follows that NFTs are the end result of a process of assetization typical of technoscientific capitalism, this is exactly the process described by Kean Birch and Fabian Muniesa (2020).¹²

Artist Brian Eno, an early adopter of new technologies in his artistic practice, is also critical of NFTs, in a conversation with Morozov he reveals to be ‘not sure what is being brought into the world that makes any difference to anything other than some strings of numbers moving about in some bank accounts. I want to know what is changing, what is being made different, what is helping, what is moving? I don’t see any answers to that question’ (Morozov 2021b). NFTs seem to him ‘just a way for artists to get a little piece of the action from global capitalism, our own cute little version of financialisation. How sweet – now artists can become little capitalist assholes as well’ (Morozov 2021b).¹³

Canadian concept artist Kimberly Parker would probably agree with Eno’s colourful definition, for her NFT sites like Ethereum are victim factories, and the victims are not just the investors but the artists themselves, since ‘This feudalist system quickly turns artists into crypto recruiters, desperate to bring even more people into the fold so the value of their Ethereum token stays high and they can sell for a profit … ’ (Parker 2021).

Her conclusions, having examined marketplace data for NFT sales, are damning:

The democratization of wealth might not be entirely successful as Parker puts it, however it is undeniable that NFTs have changed many content creators’ lives. Filipino graphic designer AJ Dimarucot (https://ajdimarucot.com/) (Figure 1), for example, announced on Twitter the sale of his Nike-inspired riff of René Magritte’s painting, The Treachery of Images, for the equivalent of $7,200, a very decent return in the context of income standards in the Philippines. Ironically the ‘treachery of images’ might be an excellent metaphorical description of the NFTs ecosystem!

For some, like @AdamantiumNFT, participation in NFTs feels almost like leading a double life

Judging by the multitude of ‘likes’ to their tweet @Adamantium is not alone in experiencing the duality of crypto vs ‘normal life’. For others quitting the day job and living off ‘their creative vision’ is the ultimate source of excitement,

To echo the headline of a Washington Post article, ‘Crypto artists have been building a rebellious, underground community of outsiders for years. Now they’re making a living selling NFTs’ (Ables 2021). Ables quotes the example of the 47-year-old Scottish artist Anna Louise Simpson (https://www.annalouisesimpson.com/), who had struggled for years in the analogue art world before she started minting ‘obsessively’ her digital collages through a popular digital art marketplace called SuperRare. And then there is the case of Lethabo Huma (https://www.lethabohuma.com/), a 22-year-old artist from South Africa who, in a few months since learning about NFTs, ‘is bringing in enough money to pay her university fees and even help her mom with finances’, or Osinachi (https://cryptoart.io/artist/osinachi), an artist in Lagos, Nigeria, ‘who makes his pieces on Microsoft Word, was able to quit his job as a librarian in March 2020 and buy a house’ (Ables 2021). However, there is also an increasing awareness among the crypto enthusiasts that things are changing, ‘The influx of financial interests threatens what many crypto artists value most about their success: the freedom to forget about money and focus on art’, and even the Museum of Crypto Art (MoCA), in the words of its Director, acknowledges on its page ‘As new money enters this space, we will be tested, and I hope everyone can remain true to what attracted them here in the first place’ (https://tinyurl.com/29n3dt8y). Similarly, the co-founder of the Left Gallery (https://left.gallery/) admits that he ‘intentionally kept prices low so artists could collect each other’s work’, also he ‘is angered by the high amounts sellers are asking for crypto works post-Beeple’ and likens the bidding landscape to rich kids in Lamborghinis driving on the highway to see who goes the fastest’ (Ables 2021).

Even Holly Herndon, one of the most interesting multidisciplinary artists working with NFTs, and supportive of their capacity to actualize the democratic and creative potential of artists in the Web 3.0, acknowledged during a panel discussion at the latest Art Basel Fair (October 2021) that NFTs are passed around by day traders and function as their own currency. However, she remains positive about NFTs’ ‘weird culture’ which, in her view, is more inclusive than the traditional art market one (Art Basel 2021). With regard to the key issue of inclusivity in the NFTs art world, in an interview for the BBC programme The Cultural Frontline in July 2021, Scottish art collector and co-founder of international collective Women of Crypto Art (WOCA) Etta Tottie and Senegalese artist Linda Rebeiz explain how they are working to make the world of NFT art more diverse. For Tottie there are serious barriers facing women working online, internet trolling being the most serious, however ‘if they wish to sell their art, they need to market their art through Twitter’. Unfortunately, Tottie admits, the aesthetic is overwhelmingly male (cyberpunk, female nudes), the crypto ‘whales’ are men who have made a lot of money in crypto, they tend to be willing to spend a lot of money for male artists, thus reproducing the same inequalities present in the ‘real’ art world. Nevertheless, the fact that a woman artist can get international exposure of one’s work in a way that is cheaper, compared to what analogue Galleries would charge in commission fees, remains incentive enough for women to get involved and evidence, in Tottie’s opinion, of a ‘feminist potential’ for NFTs.

Tottie’s comment about the overwhelming ‘male aesthetic’ of NFTs confirms the point made earlier about the importance of aesthetics in connection to ‘who gets excluded’ (Estorick, Waters, and Diamond 2021). Estorick, Waters, and Diamond (2021) have the merit of addressing the question of aesthetics, ‘overlooked in the mainstream commentary about NFTs’, by grounding it in data, while acknowledging its ‘historical freight’. As they put it, ‘The search for an aesthetics of crypto art … requires investigating the standards by which crypto artists, as well as collectors, currently distinguish works of NFT Art as more than simply digital artifacts that have been tokenized. This is important because it acknowledges the existence of different skillsets’ (Estorick, Waters, and Diamond 2021).

For them, while useful, ‘aesthetics remains highly problematic, premised as it is on the ‘disinterested’ viewpoint of a supposedly neutral agent who is, in reality, the very definition of an elitist white male spectator. … Its problem is how to reconcile further environmental damage with the potential of NFTs to redeem a generation of digital creatives from lives of economic precarity’ (Estorick, Waters, and Diamond 2021).

From an optimistic perspective, which seems at odds with the threat posed by the ‘the deadly embrace between art and money’, they contend,

A possible strategy consists in ‘Isolating the specific qualities of NFT Art, its ‘medium-specificity’ to take a modernist trope, can be instructive in establishing its long-term trajectory as an art form, beyond simply a novel asset class’. (Estorick, Waters, and Diamond 2021). And they end with an important warning:

The sale of Beeple’s (aka Mike Winkelmann) digital collage Everyday: The First 5,000 Days, for more than 69 million USD at a Christie’s auction in March 2021 would seem to attest that the above warnings have not been heard. This event had striking similarities, in terms of media hype, with the sale, also at Christie’s in October 2018 for 432,500 USD of a portrait entitled Edmond de Belamy, a work created by an algorithm called Generative Adversarial Network (GAN). The source code used by the Paris based art collective Obvious (borrowed from AI researcher/artist Robbie Barrat) to create the ‘artwork’ triggered a debate as to the authenticity, authorship and ethics of using GAN to produce AI-art explored in (Notaro 2020). The fact that the sum paid for a ‘tokenised’ piece like Everyday is so exorbitant is evidence of the impact of crypto money on the art market and might explain, in light of new ways (3D, immersive) of imagining the Internet (metaverse), the creative potential of intelligent NFTs (iNFTs) as the result of GAN/A.I. art + Crypto art = iNFTS. More on such potential below. 

The digital collage Everyday is a large, square image file (21,069 by 21,069 pixels) composed of images that Beeple released on the web, one a day, since May 1^st, 2007 and inspired by British artist Tom Judd (as Beeple acknowledged in a tweet of May 2nd, 2017). It was bought by the Singapore-based NFT production studio and crypto fund Metapurse which, in true crypto secretive stile, is financed by its pseudonymous founder Metakovan and operated by someone named Twobadour. In an interview following the sale Twobadour claimed that their interest in the work was ‘not because it’s digital and not because it’s an NFT, but because it represents compressed time and the only thing you can’t hack in this digital world is time. Skill is transferable and technology becomes obsolete. The only thing you can’t hack is time, and this piece represents 13 years of time. We believe that makes this an iconic, once-in-a-lifetime kind of piece’ (Kinsella 2021).

Unfortunately, as mentioned above (Wareing 2021), the durability of an NFT, even of a valuable one like Everyday, is far from being certain exactly because technology becomes obsolete! In the end Twobadour admits what was perhaps the real motivation behind the investment: ‘This is going to be a billion-dollar piece someday’ (Kinsella 2021).

But what about questions of aesthetics, is Everydays such a good piece of art to justify its auction prize? And, most importantly, has anyone bothered to look at all the thousands of images which make up this digital mosaic? Someone, artnet News National Art Critic Ben Davis, did by going through the thirteen year-images mosaic at Beeple’s web site (https://www.beeple-crap.com/everydays). What he discovered is that ‘there are four different Beeples at play in Everydays. None is likely to age well’ (Davis 2021). The four Beeples, in reverse chronological order, are the digital satirist, the sci-fi illustrator, the digital striver and, lastly, the Beeple who was just ‘playing around with cartoons’ (Davis 2021).

Davis is not impressed by Beeple’s skills as digital satirist, at one point he dismisses a particular cartoon because: ‘As political satire, it’s not exactly Daumier. I’m not sure it’s even South Park’, also he is not impressed by the quality of the rendering (for example in the case of Bernie Sanders depicted as a giant mother pig in a lab being milked). At best, several images about Black Lives Matter ‘come off as ghoulish’ and the ‘misogynistic treatment of Hillary Clinton … has been a consistent theme’ (Davis 2021). The misogynistic theme is also present in many images which reflect ‘late-2000s hipster irony-bro culture: cartoons, porno, and the intersection between cartoons and porno’ (Davis 2021). At the end of his journey through Everyday Davis sounds (understandably) downhearted: ‘We’ve passed through a racial uprising and a reckoning with sexism, and the cultural project of the moment is … innovating new ways to worship decade-old, BroBible-level brain farts? During a time of immiseration, investors are competing to throw tens of millions of dollars … at this?’ (Davis 2021).

Unsurprisingly Everyday is presented under an altogether different light on Christie’s auction page (https://tinyurl.com/yzvvxb75). The piece is described as ‘monumental’, ‘a unique work in the history of digital art. This was also the first time that a major auction house accepted cryptocurrency, in this case Ether so ‘Acquiring Beeple’s work is a unique opportunity’, in the words of Noah Davis, specialist in Contemporary Art at Christie’s in New York, ‘to own an entry in the blockchain itself created by one of the world’s leading digital artists’. Davis is also keen to establish an artistic link between Beeple, the graphic designer working in 3D, and the forefather of conceptual art, ‘Beeple is looking at his whole body of work as it’s presented on Instagram as a kind of Duchampian readymade.¹⁴

A ‘kind of’ is sufficient to lend artistic credentials to a piece of work which has been deemed as overvalued even by Crypto art enthusiasts like Kenny Schachter, art dealer, artist, curator and critic and a fervent believer that ‘the advent of NFTs offers a revolutionary system which is shifting the balance of power back to the content creators’ (Schachter 2021).

Comparisons of sorts between NFTs and previous ‘revolutionary’ avant-garde movements – see references to Conceptualism above – are not uncommon, only to be expected for Futurism to feature among them as well.