The Innovators: Curator Tina Rivers Ryan on Overcoming NFT Skepticism and What’s Next for Blockchain Art

She was an NFT hater. As a curator, art historian and critic, Tina Rivers Ryan had spent much of her career waiting for the digital art she loved to gain the widespread support that museums showered on traditional media such as painting and sculpture. A diverse network of artists has been exploring new technologies related to computers since the 1960s, but it wasn’t until outsiders crashed the conversation with speculative financial assets called non-fungible tokens that most of the art world began to pay serious attention. To counter the crypto market’s eclipse of this story, Ryan went on the attack. “Instead of appreciating the value of digital artworks, NFTs have sold them short,” she wrote in Art Forum in May 2021. “They confirm ownership and platform capitalism at the very moment digital art could facilitate a conversation about alternatives.”

The curator’s opinions from the Buffalo AKG Art Museum have become more nuanced in recent months. Ryan has ventured into the metaverse and cultivated friendships with leading digital artists working with NFTs, including Dmitri Cherniak, Sarah Zucker, and Itzel Yard (known online as IX Shells). For several months, she had weekly conversations with Erick Calderon, the founder of the Ethereum-based Art Blocks platform and creator of the Chromie Squiggles NFT collection. “This [moment] is a prelude to what’s to come,” she explained to Artnet News. “And I want to make sure that we [in the traditional art world] have people in the room to help shape those conversations while the future is still being worked out.”

Ryan is helping to write the first draft of this story through initiatives that include “Peer to Peer,” her museum’s recent online exhibition and fundraising auction of blockchain art in partnership with the Feral File platform, and her participation in EAT_Works, a Web3 organization matchmaking artists and technologists. And she’s getting recognition for her championing of digital art: her recent promotion to a full curatorship at the Buffalo AKG Art Museum was due in part to her active involvement in the NFT community. The Andy Warhol Foundation also awarded her a prestigious Arts Writers Grant for an upcoming series of articles on the impact of blockchain technologies on contemporary art criticism and curation.

Artnet News recently selected Ryan as one of its 2022 Innovators, a list of 35 professionals pushing the art industry forward. The following conversation is an extension of her entry on the Innovators List and a detailed look at how a skeptical art historian became one of the NFT art community’s biggest boosters.

LaTurbo Avedon, CLUB ROTHKO—ORANGE AND YELLOW STARTER PACK (2022), part of the online exhibition “Peer to Peer” presented by the Buffalo AKG Art Museum in collaboration with Feral File. Photo: © LaTurbo Avedon. Courtesy of the Buffalo AKG Art Museum.

When the NFT bubble started around two years ago, you were one of the first museum curators to sound the alarm. There were several good things from your articles and interviews during that period, but one that really sticks out in my mind is from a March 2022 New York Times article where you said that NFTs led to “an impoverishment—and not just of digital art, but of art full stop, because it reduces art to a frictionless commodity.” Do you still believe in that position?

In retrospect, I could have been more specific because I was talking about NFTs as they were promoted by certain platforms and investors coming from outside the digital art community. But it has become increasingly clear that there are other ways to engage with NFT in the market.

For example, there are certain platforms that prioritize leaderboards and emphasize viewing artwork as investments. Then there are other platforms like Feral File, like us [at the Buffalo AKG Art Museum] collaborated with on the “Peer to Peer” exhibition, which has space for comments and curatorial frameworks. In that case, the NFT is not something that takes precedence over the artwork to which it is attached, but something that is used as it was originally intended – as a digital receipt.

What I objected to was the kind of substitution or elision that occurred when tokens were prioritized. But the way the space has evolved, the balance has shifted, especially thanks to the rise of critical platforms like Outland and the writers who call for historically rooted dialogue. It makes it easier to think of digital art as art again.

Thinking about digital art has been your life’s work. But when you completed your PhD thesis at Columbia University in the early 2010s, this was not a particularly popular topic. How was your experience in academia?

I have always seen digital art as an extension of modern and contemporary art history. When I look at digital art, I see not just the technology, but a line of artists who have asked the same questions that others have asked for the last 150 years, such as the conceptual nature of art or the tensions. between abstraction and figuration.

As my Columbia advisor Branden Joseph once said, I enjoy digging around in art history. When I was there, I was particularly interested in artists who had not yet been accepted into the canon. My research continues to focus on artists whose practices have been overlooked or even irretrievably lost because the technologies they used have become obsolete.

Over the past 15 years, time-based media art such as film and performance has become increasingly important to the academic field. Now I think digital art is becoming popular, but it will be hard to know what impact, if any, NFTs will have on the discipline until many years into the future.

Amir H. Fallah, Wheel of life (2022), from the online exhibition “Peer to Peer”. Image: © Amir H. Fallah. Courtesy of the Buffalo AKG Art Museum.

You’re an art historian by training, but has researching NFTs made you feel like you’ve also earned an honors degree in economics?

It’s been very challenging, honestly, because I’m trying to bring more nuance to the intersection of art and finance without reducing it to a straw man argument where people claim one side is more tainted or pure than the other.

We need to understand how capital operates in different market ecosystems where there are different advantages and disadvantages. NFTs have not fully solved problems in the art world, although they may represent a step in the right direction. But issues such as lack of transparency, incorrect origin registration, art flipping and artists’ royalties need more work. I hope the outcome of these conversations will be that people who have been empowered and empowered by NFTs will realize the importance of these points.

What impact has being involved in the NFT community had on your role as a museum curator?

Now it is easier for us to find a larger audience. Before, the audience for digital art was defined by the general museum audience and our job was to make the digital art as relevant as possible. But now we can also curate for this larger community out there that is extremely interested in the digital arts.

Mitchell F. Chan, Winslow Homer’s Croquet Challenge (2022), from the online exhibition “Peer to Peer”. Image: © Mitchell F. Chan. Courtesy of the Buffalo AKG Art Museum.

If NFTs have acted as a catalyst for all these changes – the increased popularity of digital art, the curator’s role in exhibiting it, and university interest in researching it – what might be next for tokens? Has their role played out with the crypto crash, or is there more to see?

I think we are moving past the initial phase when NFTs were fetishized. We all know the knee-jerk reactions and criticisms of the market, so those who want to engage more deeply have the opportunity to enter into more interesting conversations around blockchain technology and how it can be used as an artistic medium.

More generally, we will also see wider adoption and more use cases advanced about NFTs. An example that comes to mind is that during Art Basel Miami Beach’s “Peer to Peer” celebration, we featured a QR code that allowed visitors to collect a digital souvenir of the event in a digital wallet via an app called Autonomy, which was developed by Feral File. The souvenir can then be presented to the Buffalo AKG Art Museum for an adult admission ticket when we open after renovations next year.

In recent weeks I have been asked a lot about what will happen to NFTs due to the FTX scandal and bankruptcy. But this brings me back to the useful distinction between the cryptocurrency market and the underlying technology. I’m not saying they’re completely divisible, but the blockchain doesn’t need to be used to create crypto. It is worth considering how we can see the blockchain develop through art in the coming years.

Follow Artnet News on Facebook:


Do you want to be at the forefront of the art world? Subscribe to our newsletter to get the latest news, eye-opening interviews and sharp critiques that drive the conversation forward.