Hold on for Dear Life, Art
“Art is something that you must breathe.”
A stranger on the internet stated that line to me several years ago and it has stuck with me. It twangs some unidentifiable chord for me, sounding that there is a mysterious biological imperative for us to engage with art, that there is some critical chemical process in our bodies that halts without it. If that statement is true, then social media is an irritation of the lungs. Non-fungible tokens (NFTs) are a coughing fit.
Non-fungible tokens: The non-fungible part of the term refers to that a token is unique and is not equitable to a different token. Information on the token, such as what it is and who owns it, is tracked on a digital ledger. The token part of the term means that an NFT is a representation of something else and conveys certain rights to the owner regarding what it represents. NFTs are typically representations of art, or digital files of art, and owners of NFTs are commonly conveyed the rights to digitally display the art that the tokens represent, along with also having the right to resell the NFT. NFTs are not proof of ownership of the actual art itself.
I am not a crypto bro. I am not a prophetic visionary of technology. When I sat through the dystopian tones of the AOL dial-up sequence for the first time as a kid in the 90s my reaction was: “why would anyone want to be on the internet?”. I have no expertise to discuss whether NFTs are “inevitable”, or “the future”, or that “they will be used for everything”, or any other claims related to the rise of Web 3.0. I don’t have a resumé that would paint me as someone with the professional acumen to speak with credibility on any of that, so I won’t.
Instead – as a human being who believes that art is akin to breathing – I’ll comment on why the application of NFTs to art feels like we’re on a regressive path in a digital world where art is continually stripped of meaning for us to use it as a façade.
Back in 2007 I remember getting my acceptance letter to college then soon after getting my student email account information sent to me. This meant that I could sign up for Facebook, which at the time required that you have a school email account to join and was geared towards casual networking in academic settings. Of course soon after this we know the platform was opened up to everyone and started in earnest towards its destiny to be the titan of social engineering that it is today. However, even back in the early days of Facebook and social media – certainly in the Myspace days if you were party to that – there was the introduction of a concept to the digital fabric of our grade-school psyches, a concept so perfect in its mimicry of our anxieties playing out in the brick and mortar of our schools: the concept that our worth was tied to our popularity.
Social media takes all the nuance of real-world group dynamics and boils it down to friend-count and likes. However, with Twitter and Instagram there is the small, but cognitively important difference that you don’t have friends, you have followers. While this still plays to the brain bleed of wanting to feel popular, it’s a slight shift from wanting to feel well-liked; it’s more so a metric to prove that you’re successful. Especially with Instagram being a place evolved to monetize creative work – either by brand sponsorships, direct sales, or revenue sharing on Reels to name a few ways – it sets a precedent that if you’re an artist then you need to be on these platforms. This is certainly the case if you’re a visual artist.
Regardless of how much of an illusion that is, social media has changed the way people understand the “loop” of their art. Cycle by cycle, it influences the “what” and “why” by promoting the generation of what performs best: content. Social media (e.g., Instagram) does a great job at conflating the two, but content does not equal art. Content is a feverishly steady hum of just-interesting-enough visual and auditory stimuli to keep people on the app and scrolling. Content is something we consume for a fleeting sense of fulfillment, or to sense that we are chasing something that will fulfill us. Content is something that we make to farm a dose of validation. Art is different. I’d offer that art is communication, whether explicit or implicit, that stirs thoughts, emotions, and even beliefs. When a platform that embeds itself into our understanding of success is based on content, I believe we, on average, experience a collective deterioration of art. The influence of social media is that everything is now content, and everything on social media is inherently cast in that light regardless of its subject. Art simply becomes a vehicle for us to engage in the social economy of these platforms.
I believe that the introduction of NFTs to art has been an attempt at adding on to the thread of precedents for art’s place in society. The influence of NFTs is that everything should now be a commodity – a digital commodity – and everything that is a digital commodity has value based only on a speculative game underpinned by artificial scarcity. Now we are free to speculate en masse on how each other's art is valuable, but only in the way it allows us to buy and flip tokens, rather than if it communicates any real meaning in the world. Art as a speculative commodity means that, beyond the obvious function of gambling (or Ponzi schemes), it provides a means for people to showcase clout; a new arena for us to act out our neuroses while pretending it’s all about the art.
Clout and money aren’t the main drivers for everyone. There’s a “fun” to NFTs because they tap into a common passion for collectibles, there’s camaraderie around that to support the creations and their creators, and NFT projects cleverly architect exclusivity to deepen that community. However, regardless of how well-intentioned certain NFT communities may or may not be, the core assets being bought and sold are tokens in speculative markets. Ultimately the focus has to be how art can increase the value of the market, how it can aid in the accumulation of wealth, because if it doesn’t then the market erodes. NFTs are a mechanism to get people to buy cryptocurrency. The art is simply a veneer, and not even a good veneer at that.
With NFTs you aren’t purchasing art, or even the equivalent of a print of the art. You are buying the receipt of the art. You are buying a token that is a representation of a copy of the actual art. You are buying the proof that you own something that is only unique because there was an expenditure of computing power that says there is a specific digital copy of something it relates to, which in every other way that a human can experience is identical to any other copy of the same thing.
If it was about art, people would buy art.
The conclusion of my commentary is simple: why? At some point we must examine why we feel passionate about something, and if the values we think we hold are reflected in the actions we take. We all have our own reasons for engaging in art, that’s a big part of why art can be such an incredible experience; someone may bring something to the conversation that is completely unexpected for you and provides that unmistakable sense of discovery. However, the reasons we choose to cram art into the grinder of social media, and now to strip it into an abstract commodity, have very little to do with this biological, or perhaps spiritual, imperative that we call art. The more that art is a veneer, an excuse, and a side-effect, the more that becomes the identity of art in our culture.
They say that NFTs herald the future, one where we spend an increasing amount of time in a simulacrum of the world – a metaverse. Whether that turns out to be true or not is beyond me, or the concern of this essay. However – and maybe this is in part the pervasive anxiety of being in a prolonged pandemic – it certainly feels like we’re on a path of decreasingly meaningful interaction. Art offers one of the few universal forms of communication, so I don’t think it’s pretentious hyperbole to scrutinize how it’s used and how that influences our communal perception of why it’s valuable (or not).
It’d be really foolish for me to think that what’s going on signals some kind of doom for art – some manner of art apocalypse. Culture goes through revolutions, renaissances, revivals… art will always have a place, it’s something that our species has demonstrated a drive to do for millennia, but it may oscillate in what we allow it to be in our cultures. So, as the crypto crowd says, HODL! Or “hold on for dear life”, which is the mantra for maintaining a long-term approach to investing in a volatile, speculative currency. Here I suggest it as, maybe not a mantra, but a reminder to hold on to why art is meaningful to you. Breathe deeply. Gn fam.