Frank Stella makes an NFT – but why?

I have to admit that when I first heard that Frank Stella was dropping an NFT my first feeling was fear. As a perpetual student of painting – and an American – I learned a lot from Stella’s direct and physical engagement with material, form and surface. There are few, if any, living artists whose work has been so purely about what it means to be a painter. In my opinion, however, this exploration has been at its most important as his work left little to reveal the origins of oil on canvas. I hate the part of me that would like to keep Stella in a box as a mere “painter”, a box that he never belonged in. Breaking the frame and then the plane, Stella has always been as steadfast in her mission as progression as he was with the lines in his early work.

My second thought was, “I wonder if he’s nervous.” Jumpy? I project. Stella has made many creative departures in her long career. He is no stranger to disappointing those who have a vested interest in things remaining the same. He has suffered and survived pantheons of pandering by critics. If he cared when today’s critics in 1977 called him a traitor to Minimalism, he was certainly over it in 2015 when Jerry Saltz said a lot that his work “looks like terrible space junk”.

It could still be said that Stella, aged 86, only has something to lose by venturing into NFTs. Still, Stella’s motivation for embossing (the term used when an artist creates an NFT) may be the consolidation of his legacy as a painter’s painter.

To be a painter’s painter is to be an artist deeply admired by those who also create, to be important or influential to other painters. Often marked by an obsession with materials and craft, other painters wonder: “how do you do it?” Until you’ve actually tried to make a copy of a Stella painting (something I don’t recommend if you’re prone to despair) they may look easy to do. Due to problems with flow and the mechanics of getting just the right amount of paint on the brush, they are almost impossible to make. But this is not the only reason why Stella is a painter’s painter. He has been actively involved in campaigns to make the artist’s resale right a de facto condition.

As much as Stella has cared about material, physical form and surface, he has taken care of the rights of his fellow artists. For several decades he has lectured and lobbied for resale rights. NFTs are trying to make this a reality. Placing his enormous weight behind the NFT form is for Stella an endorsement of the mechanics of resale for which he has long worked. In this sense, Stella isn’t ditching NFTs because it’s necessarily the safe or fashionable thing to do: he seems to be doing it for artists hoping to live in a fairer art world. While the artist royalty contracts often embedded in NFTs are far from perfect or clear, they still represent a significant step forward.

From the 1980s, Stella used computer-aided design (CAD) software to model his works. His NFTs come from this source work and essentially require no significant changes in his practice or reassessment of his oeuvre.

It used to be a common joke that Stella’s career could, and perhaps should, have been played out in reverse: he began with bits of purity and simplicity and has spent the last few years exploring less linear ideas. His commitment to NFTs – and what they mean to his fellow artists – definitively disproves this.