Nearly a century apart, the short-lived boom and current bust of the non-fungible token (NFT) marketplace – basically contained from Q4 2021 to the first-half 2022 – and the writings of German-Jewish culture critic Walter Benjamin (1892-1940) are connected by a fixation on originality. We place a value on the uniqueness of a work of art, being the only one of its kind.
What makes a work of art “original”? What makes any JPEG of “Disaster Girl” more “authentic” or “original” than the one Farzin Fardin Fard bought for six figures from its “author”? More saliently, how do the mechanisms of capitalism exploit the feeling of authenticity and originality to make art valuable? What separates artists and art from their licensing deals and IP rights?
I’ve found myself wondering, at times, what would Benjamin have made of NFTs, had he lived to see the motley internet culture of today (and, indeed, the rise of a new fascism like the regime which he had to flee in Berlin)? As an art theorist whose notion of artistic originality wrestled with the challenges of technological reproduction, what would he have had to say on this issue?
Let’s localize an example: at the Beaverbrook Art Gallery in Fredericton, there’s a giant Salvador Dali painting of a Christ figure on a rearing horse. It’s the height of like … a two-story building? You may – or at least I remember this – be invited by the art gallery’s staff to lie down with your feet against the wall to observe the painting from the ground, for a different perspective.
Now, the experience of this painting is the intangible vibe of being in a room with it. You can’t have that experience anywhere else. You can’t photograph or videotape the experience exactly as you felt it. If you go back to see the painting again, you won’t feel quite the same way as you did the first time. That’s the aura of a work of art: it’s the feeling of being with it. Its uniqueness.
In his essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Technological Reproducibility,” Benjamin argues for an “aura” to the work of art anchored to things like its medium (how it was made) and its time and place (where is it, how can one “be” with the work). For his example, he uses the notion of a painting in a gallery: that’s why I just reminded you about the vibe of that Dali painting.
The main gist of what I want you to take away right now is this: a work of art has an essential material quality you can’t copy. If I take a photo of the Dali in Fredericton, it loses something. If the gallery puts a high-res image of the Dali on the internet: that’s a copy. If you want the real deal and all the feelings (whatever they are) that come with it, you gotta go to see the original.
Now, the issue of what makes a work of art feel unique is complicated, as Benjamin cogently raised about filmmaking, when you can’t see the parts which make the finished work whole. When a film is assembled, what we get doesn’t show the excess of film left on the editing room floor, nor the performances of the actors on the sound stage. What we get appears on the screen.
Benjamin could not have envisaged the challenges of digital streaming services for film, either. With the advent of Netflix and the proliferation of services competing for your attention and bidding their highest dollar for content, what is the material existence of a digital, streamed film? Does it have any? When I can’t even possess the facsimile of that film in DVD / Blu-ray form!?
Take as an example: the public screening debut of Glass Onion: A Knives Out Film in Canada happened as part of the Toronto International Film Festival in November. Makes sense to debut it there, but its rights are controlled by Netflix, in an increasingly common model of having theatrical films skip the theaters straight to streaming. Glass Onion arrived on streaming Dec. 23.
What’s the aura of a film like Knives Out (which I saw in theaters and watched dozens of times since at home) as opposed to the one of Glass Onion, which I only saw on Netflix – will it even get a physical release on Blu-ray disc? This is how the issue of medium, capital funding of film projects and the “originality” of living the experience of a work of art gets complicated, fast.
Let’s say, taking into account of the mystery of whether non-material art products like Glass Onion even have an “aura,” that the the long-dead Benjamin were somehow transubstantiated into a young-ish man around the California tech scene – conversant with the Internet, digital goods and the modern financial challenges post-2008 recession. What would he think?
Our “Ben” knows full well who Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos and Steve Jobs are. He’s seen Knives Out and Glass Onion and liked them well enough. Maybe he’s a grad school dropout from UCLA. Ben is the kind of person who will go to the trouble of finding original pressings of vinyl albums from the 1970s, which he plays on original hardware – but he still has Spotify on his phone.
So, Ben, being a clever sort, subscribed to Axios newsletters and plugged into long-form YouTube essay culture (see BreadTube), sees the NFT craze arrive and bluntly declares: “this is an absolute nothingburger, there’s nothing to see here.” This surprises his friends, some of whom hold a little Bitcoin as a novelty. Ben, what do you mean there’s nothing to see about NFTs?
“Look, the dismissal of NFTs as a way for digital artists to make money has been handled by people like Dan Olson” – Line Goes Up – The Problem with NFTs – “so I’m just going to parrot some version of what they’ve said. I keep hearing incredulous defenses of digital artists needing some way to monetize their art. You can pay artists for their work. You don’t need an NFT.
“But, like, let’s cut right to the chase where you don’t need to watch ten hours of YouTube essays and deconstructionist theory. The TL;DR of Dan’s video is that NFTs are a multi-level-marketing (MLM) scheme to get people to buy cryptocurrency. It’s a scam. If you want to understand why NFTs have no redeemable value whatsoever, you gotta cut right to the essence of what they are.
“There’s this other video by Stephen (Coffeezilla) Findeisen called Right Clicking All the NFTs where he’s talking to a guy who basically created a Pirate Bay torrent to trick people into ‘getting free NFTs’ and the entire point of his trick is to show people, just like Coffeezilla, why NFTs are nothing more than hyperlinks to files that don’t exist and you can’t own. It’s not about art at all.
“In real time, you watch Coffeezilla realize how NFTs are hyperlinks to originals which aren’t really there. If you buy an NFT, what are you buying? A picture made by an artist, right? No, not really. Like the guy in the video explains, you’re buying directions to a treasure which the seller promises you exists, on the blockchain. Because the NFT wasn’t about art, it’s about currency.
“Everything about the NFT transaction process commodifies the experience of art. It’s about turning an NFT into actual money you can spend, not make-believe money you can’t. To buy that NFT, you had to buy Ethereum with real money. The person who gave your crypto to for that bill of sale can cash out because along the way you got got. It was never about the image.”
The “art assets” put into NFTs aren’t the purpose of the tool themselves, in the same way the art we put on actual currency isn’t about making something beautiful. It’s purely transactional. Sure, in the making of art in our society, some transactional behavior is required, but the end goal is to make an experience for someone. To make art for other people. To create experiences for people.
The experience of the work of art is that thing which the aura preserves. It’s what someone felt as they experienced the work. All of the transactions along the way to that experience are accidents and compromises imposed by the complications and inadequacies of our capitalist system. What survives my viewing of Glass Onion isn’t the receipt from my Netflix bill: it’s the experience.
The NFT art market is a grift designed to help wealthy people launder their money (to hide wealth from taxation) and a means to print currency outside the control of central banking. The art involved is an accident of the process, in the same way the art on real money is as a means to distinguish a quarter from a dime. Do you reflect on your experiences spending a quarter?
Think of NFTs in the same way and with the same detachment as you do money – or rather, Monopoly money – and you’ll understand the intended use case of them and for crypto as well.
Dani Godbout is a member of the NB Media Co-op editorial board. They wrote their doctoral dissertation on the writings of Walter Benjamin and the relationship between depression and art.
