Non-fungible tokens (NFTs) are digital objects that represent something else, such as a piece of art, a video, or even a tweet. They confirm the existence and ownership of this item through a data record on a blockchain (a distributed ledger technology).
Since the emergence of NFTs in 2016, many artists have experimented with this new digital device to market their creations. NFTs are most often bought and sold via auction sites, where payments are made in cryptocurrency (such as ether currency). It is this notion of a certificate registered on a blockchain that distinguishes an NFT from a standard digital work.
The public and media discourse about NFTs is polarized: in the eyes of their staunchest enthusiasts, NFTs represent the future of art, while their critics consider them a huge ripoff and waste of energy.
How can this NFT phenomenon be characterized? To what extent does it challenge the established codes of contemporary art?
As a researcher specializing in media studies and cultural sociology, I give a brief overview of the situation.
Crypto evangelists and crypto skeptics
On the one hand, there is the camp that can be described as crypto-evangelists: they adhere to a discourse that presents NFTs as a radical revolution that will change everything.
This is precisely the discourse surrounding the sensational 2021 sale of a work by the artist Beeple (a collage of vignettes created by digital software) at the prestigious auction house Christie’s for almost $70 million. According to the two principal buyers, the purchase was “emblematic of a revolution in progress,” and marked “the beginning of a movement carried out by an entire generation.”
On the other side are the crypto-skeptics. This is the position of Hito Steyerl, a widely recognized media artist. She believes that NFTs are “the equivalent of toxic masculinity”, and blames their development on “the worst and most monopolistic actors” who “extract labor from precarious workers” and “take up way too much attention and use up all the oxygen in the room .”
This polarization means that the real potential of NFTs, as well as their flaws, which are also very real, tend to be overshadowed by caricatured principled positions. However, within this ecosystem of NFTs exists a set of rich and diverse artistic practices.
New creative scenes
The NFT format definitely represents a new type of traded object. It is based on a new type of contract (known as “smart”), which itself is a result of the innovation of blockchain technology. In this way, the NFT format has given rise to the emergence of a new creative scene. Or rather scenes, in the majority, which are characterized by great exuberance – but also by certain contradictions.
The “native” scenes of the NFT format, that is, those born with the invention of this format, are characterized by a strong media visibility, a volume of far-reaching financial investment and, for some of its actors, a willingness to reshuffle the art world’s short by criticizing its established order.
A large part of the NFT creators come from a practice of 3D modelling, graphic design, animation or video game design – in other words from the creative industry. Over the past decades, this sector has generated a very large pool of expertise, whose creative surplus finds an expression in the NFT format, but also a source of additional income to cope with the often precarious conditions of creative work.
Many figures of the native NFT scenes are, to use the expression of the sociologist Howard S. Becker, outsiders (neophytes) in relation to the established art world. That is, they socialize in circles other than those of the institutional art world, and they break its rules in many ways.
A more egalitarian art world?
The discourse of the principal purchasers of Beeple’s sensational work is very illuminating in this sense. MetaKovan and Twobadour (two investors in the crypto world, both of Indian origin) reveal in an interview:
We have been conditioned, from a very young age, to believe that art was not for us. …We have always been against the idea of exclusivity. The metaverse is all encompassing. … A metaverse where everyone will have the same rights, powers, will be legitimate. … It is particularly egalitarian.
However, there are major contradictions between the discourse of egalitarianism they advocate here, and its implementation in the projects of these two investors. For example, during the Dreamverse tech art event they organized in New York in 2021, the entrance fee for the evening ranged between US$175 and US$2,500 – a prohibitive cost for many amateurs. Rather, this hierarchy of prices leads to the reproduction of a logic of exclusivity that favors the most fortunate.
Museums are cautious
The gap between the market value of NFTs and their value in museums is unprecedented. The former reaches unimaginable heights, while the latter is still at the bottom. In fact, the collection of NFT by museums is, until today, a very marginal practice. Only a handful of NFTs are integrated into museum collections. Some of them have been acquired after an exhibition in a museum, where they are presented on digital screens hung on the wall.
Cultural legitimacy is affected by disintermediation (elimination of intermediaries) and remediation (introduction of new intermediaries) that characterize the NFT world. In its disruptive impulse, the proclaimed revolution of NFTs cuts off from a chain of well-established, legitimate intermediaries – gallery owners, curators, art critics, conventional collectors and public subsidies.
It has replaced them with new intermediaries, primarily “whales” – investors who have made a fortune from cryptocurrency – or popular culture celebrities. These new intermediaries over-invest in financial capital in the production of NFTs with the aim of achieving a prestigious position as a collector, or to enrich themselves by increasing the value of works. But they often lack the social and cultural capital to find a way to access museums and their exhibition spaces and their collections.
In search of legitimacy
However, these works are publicly available, as all NFTs are freely searchable on buyers’ e-wallets. Some collectors buy works just to speculate. Others gain visibility by displaying their NFTs in a metaverse (a virtual world) such as Decentraland or Space.
And for others, the search for legitimacy still goes further: in the spring of 2022, a group of artists, curators, collectors and NFT platforms organized a decentralized art pavilion, parallel to the Venice Biennale. Outside the official program, the exhibition aimed to place NFTs in orbit around this important contemporary art event.
But the presence of NFTs remained marginal in this edition of the Biennale. Only the Cameroon pavilion exhibited NFTs under the direction of a curator with a shady reputation, and the results were disappointing.
The recognition of the NFTs by the consecrated art world may come through other avenues, such as the more experimental practices presented at the documenta art exhibition in Kassel, Germany this year, or through artistic movements from developing countries, such as the Balot project, which used a NFT to criticize the appropriation of a work originating from the Republic of Congo by an American museum.
So recognition can come through the margins. But in these cases the marginal actors could more easily gain access to the established art world because they share its codes.
