A royal gesture

Kitsch pretends to demand nothing from his customers except their money—not even their time.
~Clement Greenberg, Avant-garde and Kitsch

Non-fungible tokens are fit. The first furore was prompted in March 2021 by Christie’s sale of Beeple’s opus for the princely sum of $69,346,250 has long since sunk. Damien Hirst has had enough time to end his years Currency project – an experiment that pitted unique physical paintings against their blockchain inscriptions. Donald J. Trump is a conspicuous latecomer to this party, a fact he was strangely eager to emphasize when he announced his first NFT trading card drop in December 2022. Trump admitted that NFTs were no longer a “hot category . … Everyone said ‘what’s he doing that for — it’s so cold.'” Trump normally presents himself as a leader, not a follower, so what could have made him jump into this game so late, and even boast of his lateness? Even more confusing, why would he release a new series of NFTs in mid-April this year, causing the value of the first collection to immediately collapse?

In the wake of the original fall, Trump claimed his motives were purely aesthetic, a point he reiterated in an April 19 Truth Social post: “My New Trump Digital Trading Cards Series 2 is the Number One Collection in the World. It must be that people love the art.” From his alleged triumph, Trump deduced that this “truly incredible work of art” must be “very beautiful and interesting.” Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, of course, but the cards are certainly interesting. The first batch of 45,000 NFTs consisted of extravagantly camp and heroic portraits of Trump as a muscle-bound cowboy, a rock star and even an astronaut – quintessentially American imagery. In sharp contrast, a number of images in series 2 have a distinctly monarchical flavour.

This grafting of royal iconography onto the archetypal representations of Republican masculinity exemplifies Trump’s recurrent translation of pop cultural icons into political power. In contrast to the nostalgic image of the first drop, the new series is aggressively forward-looking, as if to signal Trump’s electoral ambition. The number of NFTs in the latest downturn has increased from 45,000 to 47,000, a likely reference to Trump as a former 45th and hopeful 47th POTUS. In addition to the array of familiar cosplay options, the cards feature Trump in an impressive array of monarchical guises. In one of them, Trump is represented as a solitary golden chess king holding the globe of the earth in his right hand, while his scepter serves as a pole for the American flag. He also has, like each of the four kings from the deck, his crowns and ermines matched with the patterns of their respective suits. In another, Trump appears to hover above the clouds, arms crossed, fronted by a fiery crowned lion soaring above the Milky Way. The lion is the leitmotif of Series 2, often rendered and referenced in renderings of Firefighter Trump, Superhero Trump, Surfer Trump, and so on.

Each of these cards imposes Trump’s image on a well-established archetype. And yet the archetypes themselves are muddled and confused because the focus of attention is the central personality. Trump is what unites the quarterback and the surfer, the cowboy and the billionaire. As usual, the unmistakable message is: TRUMP. He is the series’ main character and only attraction; the king pin. It seems unlikely that the allusion is intentional, but this monarchical valence recalls an earlier American populist politician who used similar imagery: Huey Long, the “Kingfish” of Louisiana. And while the dedicated site has more in common with QVC than any other NFT platform, Trump seems to have developed the perfect way to exploit this new technology in a truly Trumpian way – by systematically undermining its core principles.

Up to this point in their extremely short history, the central, indispensable premise of a successful NFT case has been that the medium is based on a “community” of NFT holders, and on that community’s consensus of economic and aesthetic value. Damien Hirst’s project used chat rooms, message boards, special offers, enhanced access, real meetings and analog publications to create a sense of community among buyers. Building this community was central to the project’s strategy for value accumulation. In the case of Hirst’s Currencythe sense of community became part of the artwork itself, easily recognizable and immediately monetized at each individual point of sale or resale.

So far, the art world’s breach of the community principle has tended to bring immediate disaster upon itself. In the summer of 2022, as part of a much-publicized, fateful drop of 10,000 non-fungible tokens, Miami-based entrepreneur Martin Mobarak burned a drawing of Frida Kahlo. As we wrote elsewhere, that stunt cost Mobarak a lot of money (he valued the drawing he destroyed at $10 million), and put him at risk of criminal prosecution for destroying works of art considered a national treasure by Mexico. It also proved that paying lip service to the NFT “community”, while exploiting it as a passive backdrop for a one-man show, would provide neither financial nor aesthetic value.

Trump hopes to establish an exception to this rule. Unlike the hapless Miami businessman, Trump is a recognizable cultural icon. He is a brand, as evidenced by the sales pitch for his NFTs, recently delivered on the OpenSea platform: “The collection contains unique Trump Trading Cards, Limited One-of-Ones, Gold & Silver Autographed Cards. Cowboy Trump, Astronaut Trump, Business Trump … Which Trump are you?” The audience is invited to project their own fantasies onto Trump’s image, in a neat postmodern reversal of the Sun King’s l’etat c’est moi. Trump’s NFTs derive all their value from a single source – Trump himself. This allows him to reduce his “community” to just a brand vehicle driven by his admirers. They relate to him as subjects relate to a monarch, but also, incoherently, as consumers relate to a product.

The product-to-consumer relationship is crucial here. Trump’s QVC approach to the “bonus” features of his NFTs (dinner with Trump, rounds of golf on the course, etc.) allows him to translate intangible assets into tangible or experiential in a way that consumer fans can understand. This may also explain why, contrary to expectations, both of his drops sold out in less than 24 hours. Trump addressed the core weakness of crypto – its unmanageability – by offering old-fashioned contests, and the short history of NFTs has followed a comparable arc of materialization. When NFTs first blazed into public consciousness, it was often noted that they lacked any utility. Their content generally involved simplistic variations of youth subculture, comics, sci-fi, fan fiction, or fantasy art. They didn’t even give their owners exclusive access to the images they represent, which can be enjoyed (or tolerated) by anyone online. The only benefit to the owner of an NFT is the ability to enjoy the joy of ownership, perhaps using the image for their social media avatar. NFTs were understood to be definitively intangible assets—the apotheosis of symbolic exchange value.

But in the last couple of years there have been strenuous efforts to give some kind of material use value of NFTs. Consumption and marketing bleed into each other. Buyers collaborate with producers on projects where the sole purpose is profit. The creation of aesthetic value is conceptually and empirically inseparable from the creation of economic value. This is why building a self-publishing community is now the crucial element of any NFT publication. This addition of use value to the pure exchange value embodied in NFTs is perceived as a moral advance. Crypto commentators have long been troubled by NFTs’ lack of any tangible content, so it’s a relief to think that consumers are now getting something real for their money. By making a sense of community integral to the profit-making process, issuers of NFTs could conceivably challenge the amoral individualism of the traditional capitalist entrepreneur.

Trump, of course, has no problem with amoral individualism. Nor should the mere existence of NFT communities be interpreted as an egalitarian or progressive development. In some cases, their emergence facilitates branding and exclusivity. After all, there are many types of community. Aristotle identified three: democracies, oligarchies and monarchies. The idealistic libertarians behind early NFTs saw their societies as democratic and proudly egalitarian: each member given equal access to all areas, granted an equal voice in debates, treated with equal respect in real life.

As in real life, however, these democracies tended to degenerate into oligarchies, ruled by the rich. Thus, the Bored Apes Yacht Club enforces exclusivity by limiting its membership to 10,000 – mostly tech billionaires, early crypto investors and A-list celebrities. By adjusting the demographics of their communities, NFT issuers can associate their brands with particular social groups and cultural attitudes. Societies can then become echo chambers that encourage groupthink towards consensus, where members imagine themselves in possession of superior knowledge or cultural power over excluded ‘norms’. Exclusivity increases desirability, which in turn increases profit. As the Bored Ape Yacht Club puts it:

When you buy a Bored Ape, you’re not just buying an avatar or a provably rare piece of art. You get membership access to a club whose benefits and offers will increase over time. Your Bored Ape can serve as your digital identity and open digital doors for you.

Donald Trump understands the value of exclusivity. In the promotional video for his second series, he promised just that: “When you buy one, you’re joining a very exclusive community—that’s my community.” The supposed perks include the chance to win a one-night seat at Trump’s dinner table, which seemed to give him pause: “I’m not sure if it’s a fantastic prize, but it’s what we’ve got.” This is the blasé false modesty of a monarch. And while a benign monarchy serves the interests of the people, it always degenerates into tyranny when the monarch’s selfish interests prevail.

Perhaps Trump’s belated appearance on the NFT stage is best interpreted as an unintended but nonetheless significant intervention in the debate between the relative merits of aesthetic and economic value. All NFTs testify to the convergence of aesthetics and economics, but Trump’s project also provides an ironic comment on the process. In economic terms, the buyers of Trump’s NFTs are not producers but consumers. They play no role in the creation of the cards’ value, which they only passively enjoy. In political terms they are not citizens but subjects. They do not constitute a self-governing community; they have projected their own power onto a foreign idol. In aesthetic terms, they are not critics, but fans. Their role is not evaluation, but praise, because by praising the product publicly, they increase its value.

It would be a mistake to dismiss the postmodern irony of Trump’s NFTs as mere naff or kitsch. They act as a serum that reveals the deep truth beneath incredulous accusations or false comments like “King Me” Time magazine cover from 2018, or Voxhis satirical piece, “The Case for Making Donald Trump America’s First King” from 2016. This time, as they like to say on MSNBC, he was finally able to say the quiet part out loud, posing as the king of hearts, a checkerboard king, a lion springing. The symbols he uses are disjointed, but this is by design. They let Trump, the consummate salesman, be all things to all people. Before our eyes, a heraldic lion transforms into the MAGA lion calling its subjects/consumers/fans into Trump’s ersatz monarchy.