“The NFT bubble has burst, but there is still untapped potential in digital art”
So NFTs have gone quickly from boom to predictable bust. By the end of 2022, about 18 months after the explosion began, marketplaces had folded or lost almost all value. The Art Basel Miami Beach fair – full of NFT evangelism just 12 months earlier – had by last December lost faith.
Like many of us, I was happy, not just because my email inbox can now regain equilibrium after being choked with news of Z-list celebrities and washed-up artists hammering home their tacky, aesthetically poor, conceptually thin NFT project. But also because it was terrifying how the hype around NFTs had led to them being often used as a shorthand for digital art in general, enabling tech bros and speculators to enter the field in shameless pursuit of a quick revolution, and art world insiders. who should have known better to greedily indulge them.
But the NFT crash does not invalidate blockchain—the underlying technology that makes NFTs unique and traceable—as an artistic space. It existed before and will be explored by artists in the future. In 2018, Ruth Catlow, co-author of Artists Re:Thinking the Blockchain, then compared nascent blockchain art to early Net Art – the first online art movement – in the opportunities it offered to respond critically to systems of power as well as being a space for experimentation and collaboration. For example, Jonas Lund has issued tokens that allow you to participate in decisions concerning his life, while Sarah Friends Click on my is a satire of crypto generating useless wealth via a clicker game
So now might be a good time to remind ourselves of the decades-long history of digital art. Two current exhibitions—Coded: Art Enters the Computer Age, 1952-1982 at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (through July 2), and I’ll Be Your Mirror: Art and the Digital Screen at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Texas (through April 30)—offers just such an opportunity.
Coded beginning with the first purely aesthetic image created on a computer and ending at the point where personal computers took their place at the center of our homes. It shows how artists – including key conceptual art figures such as Stanley Brouwn, Charles Gaines and Fluxus artist Emmett Williams – grappled with computers in those early years. Often they never returned to them as a medium. But their experiments were “essential as an origin story for the art and culture of the internet,” writes the show’s curator, Hannah Higgins, in the foreword to the catalog.
I want to be your mirror explores the use of the screen in art from 1969 to the present, through early digital pioneers such as Lynn Hershman Leeson, key Net Art figures such as Eva and Franco Mattes, and artists who have continued to push the medium in recent years, including Hito Steyerl.
What connects many of these artists, no matter how different their aesthetics, is a balance between curiosity and skepticism about the digital field – a quality lacking among the NFT excesses. As Higgins puts it in relation to the early digital pioneers, “artists bend rules, they play, they experiment with new solutions to old questions and find new questions”. These are good principles for the artists who can help blockchain art rise from the NFT ashes.
• Coded: Art enters the computer age, Lacma, Los Angeles, through July 2
• I’ll Be Your Mirror: Art and the digital screen, Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Texas, through April 30
