Art Worlds
NFTs: The Afterlife of the Aura
Two recent controversies suggest that the emergence of crypto art may forever undermine the hegemony of the object-centered art market. In March 2021, a firm known as Injective Protocol bought a Banksy print for $95,000, sold an NFT of it for $380,000, and publicly burned the original on YouTube. Then, in April 2021, a firm known as Daystrom attempted to auction off an NFT of a drawing by Jean-Michel Basquiat on the understanding that the purchaser would have the right to “deconstruct” the original.
Both were provocations in the venerable tradition of Dada and Punk, and the pearl-clutching public reaction was an integrated response. Headlines included “NFT: No Fucking Thanks,” “Sickos” and the withering deadpan of the BBC: “Banksy Art Burned, Destroyed and Sold as Token in ‘Money-making Stunt.’”
The idea that the destruction of art can be part of art is old news, having been espoused throughout the twentieth century by artists ranging from Yves Klein to Pete Townshend. Such auto-destruction aimed to make a grander statement than anything available within the formal confines of material art. In 1953, attempting “to figure out a way to bring drawing into all whites,” the young Robert Rauschenberg came up with the idea of erasing an extant drawing. Not one of his own, though. Rauschenberg was then pretty much unknown, and he insisted that the drawing erased had to be “real art.” He approached the abstract expressionist Willem de Kooning, whose work was held in the highest esteem. The chasm between the two men’s artistic standing was the key to the project, pointedly framing the affair as a newcomer’s challenge for dominance.
The “Erased de Kooning Drawing” sent shock waves through the New York art world. It was simultaneously hailed as a daring act of Neo-Dada defiance and damned as ignorant vandalism. But Rauschenberg’s stunt was an attempt to force his way into the artistic canon, not a challenge to the existence of the canon itself. Long after his apparently anti-aesthetic gesture had been comfortably assimilated into high art, Rauschenberg described it as “poetry.” The advent of digital art NFTs is very different. A moral gulf separates an artist who painstakingly erases another’s drawing, with his explicit permission, from the wanton destruction of an artist’s work by the owner of its digital avatar.
The NFT that represents the artwork stands in an antithetical, hostile relation to the original. The putative purchaser of the Basquiat non-fungible token was granted the option to “deconstruct” the original, because by doing so, they would transform the NFT itself into the original. But even if Basquiat’s handiwork had been destroyed, its reproductions would remain. In the twenty-first century, the NFT—a digital imprint of the work in the blockchain—is thus actually more unique than the original drawing itself. As BurntBanksy put it:
If you were to have the NFT and the physical piece, the value would be primarily in the physical piece. By removing the physical piece from existence and only having the NFT, we can ensure that the NFT, due to the smart contract ability of the blockchain, will ensure that no one can alter the piece and it is the true piece that exists in the world. By doing this, the value of the physical piece will then be moved onto the NFT.
The financial value of the artwork rises, Phoenix-like, from the ashes of the original’s destruction and finds a new abode in the NFT. What was really destroyed when the Banksy was burned? Neither the image itself, which continues to exist online, nor access to the image, which is available to anyone with a computer or a smartphone. By physically destroying the Banksy print, the purchasers of the NFT attacked the Benjaminian “aura” that dwelt within the original work of art.
The “aura” is what makes the experience of viewing Da Vinci’s Mona Lisa in the Louvre, or his drawings at the Met, different from looking at their images in a book. It is inseparable from the viewer’s visceral reaction to the physical traits of the work: variable pressure of the crayon on paper, the thickness of impasto brushstrokes or their glossy translucency, the weave of the canvas showing through the loosely applied imprimatura, the mutable effects of light playing on the surface at different times of day. An artwork’s aura is also the source of its financial value, the reason the original Mona Lisa is worth more than a reproduction. But if the original is destroyed, there is nowhere physical for the aura to reside. The aura’s abstract, symbolic nature is then revealed, and it becomes possible to package, market and sell the aura in the absence of the original. The destruction of the original allows the NFT to monetize the aura, imposing on it the form of financial value. As Daystrom explain:
Value has become increasingly fungible, diluted and unstable in our evolving metaverse and there’s a tremendous spike in user demand for exclusivity. NFT assets provide this exclusivity and create an entirely new online value system that was previously unimaginable.
But an “aura” is not a material thing. Does it necessarily perish along with its physical incarnation? Perhaps it was not destroyed so much as transubstantiated, reborn into a financialized afterlife where it is no longer subject to mortal decay. Like BurntBanksy, Daystrom make a plea for authenticity, not a protest against it. But authenticity is no longer a quality of the original artwork, contingent on the artist’s touch or painterly gesture. Authenticity is now a quality of the NFT that represents the original, and the only authenticity available today is statistical uniqueness. Yet people remain sentimentally attached to the old distinctions between authenticity and image, original and reproduction, reality and representation. The cries of fear and loathing at the prospect of destroying a Basquiat drawing (albeit not a great one) or a Banksy print (albeit one of an edition of 500) are not naïve defenses of the artwork’s lost integrity. They are inarticulate but nonetheless passionate protests against the postmodern condition. No wonder the word “deconstruction” where simple “destruction” would have sufficed was so triggering.
Of course, the owner of anything has always had the right to destroy it: that is what ownership means. There was a persistent rumor that Van Gogh’s Portrait of Dr. Gachet was cremated along with its deceased owner in 1996. It turned out to be false, but the idea of an owner wantonly destroying the work evidently resonated with the Zeitgeist. To preempt any such plans, the federal government passed the Visual Artists Rights Act of 1990 to protect works of “recognized stature” from destruction by their owners. In this context, the new form of ownership represented by NFTs is arguably more democratic than its predecessor. When ownership involved taking physical possession of the unique artwork, the owner could easily prevent the public from viewing it by keeping it in a bank vault. In the digital age, the detachment of the aura from the artwork makes such hogging impossible, so perhaps this detachment is not the problem. The problem is the NFT’s inherent antipathy towards the original.
That has the potential to become a very serious problem. NFTs are liable to physically attack the artworks they represent as long as there is a financial incentive for them to do so—and such an incentive is hard-wired into their blockchain nature. In dystopian theory, NFTs could obliterate all actually existing works of art, replacing them with tokens of their financial value. The process would be seamless. NFTs simultaneously embody two kinds of abstraction: financial value and the aesthetic aura. The fact that both of these abstractions can be incarnated in the same symbol at the same time shows that they have become functionally identical. And if identical, then interchangeable.
If art is money, then money is art. The history of money is a process of aestheticization, and the NFT heralds its climax. As money develops from precious metals through bank notes and credit cards to cryptocurrencies, its symbolic nature is incrementally revealed, and its kinship with other forms of symbolic representation becomes clear. The arcane gyrations of financial “derivatives” that constitute today’s economy are entirely figural in nature, and thus ontologically indistinguishable from the manipulation of symbols in art, poetry or music.
It is this final collapse of aesthetics into economics that dismays the artworld’s commentators, although they do not yet articulate their fears coherently. They are right to be alarmed. The proposed physical destruction of the artwork may (Banksy) or may not (Basquiat) actually happen, but the concept of art as something different from money has already been fatally undermined. Aesthetics and economics are united in the NFT, but theirs will not be a partnership of equals. And while artists and critics may be slow to catch on, economists should easily recognize the merger for what it is: a hostile takeover.