Beeplemania
NFT, WTF?
Vignesh Sundaresan bought a JPEG file and a hyperlink for $69 million. He called it a “crazy” purchase—even crazier than investing in cryptocurrency, he told Bloomberg in an interview. I’m pretty sure most of us would agree with him. To that end, here are a few things he could have spent $69 million on instead: 69 million lottery tickets to get a return on his investment, 4,600 superior, top-shelf hair transplants if he’s losing a little on the sides, 15,333,333 hamburgers just in case he gets hungry, or adoption fees for 1,725 children—if it really is lonely at the top.
Clearly, there’s something appealing about this purchase to a relatively small audience—one composed of Bitcoin bros and techie powerhouses. The piece in question, “EVERYDAYS: The First 5000 Days” by digital artist Beeple, is exciting art collectors and investors alike with a new bullish trend: the non-fungible token (NFT).
An NFT is the virtual representation of non virtual objects that run the gamut from art pieces to NBA highlights. “Non-fungible” means that the token is completely unique; fungibility refers to the replacement of an item with something identical to it. Take the value of a dollar as an example—it stays constant no matter whose hand the bill is in. You and I could trade dollar bills, and we would each still have a piece of paper worth exactly one dollar. However, if we traded non-fungible tokens, each of us would be in possession of something irreplicable.
NFTs offer only one thing—ownership. I could Google “Beeple” and download the exact same image Sundaresan bought a few weeks ago. But only he has the recorded ownership of it. There is no way to forge, steal or tamper with an NFT. Conversely, any of these actions can befall a painting—it’s quite passé to be tangible these days.
What makes NFTs safe from replication is the oft-discussed and oft-misunderstood power of a blockchain. Blockchains have the capability to grant a piece of virtual art the allure of scarcity and uniqueness; it creates a single version of the artwork that gets put on a record of transactions, much like the provenance of a physical painting. There is only one title of owner, and you can always tell who it is—the ownership resides on the blockchain.
Despite a flurry of wild prices, enticing novelty and frenzied media attention, the NFT does not capture the zeitgeist of our time. The greater audience defines an era; the richest among us do not represent the vast majority of people who may not even know what an NFT is. It is foolish to assume that a month-long period of turbulent mania will continue to be worth millions of dollars or capture the news cycle past its shock value.
Despite the promise, the sheer amount of wealth being thrown around the NFT sphere is a little sickening. It seems to me an excess of capitalism. Why does everything, especially art, have to be about ownership? Art should be for people and their viewership, not people and their ownership.
While the blockchain makes NFTs more accessible than a Pollock, they carry the same elite exaltation as one. Although they seem to characterize the first art movement we’ve seen in a long while, they are still a relatively new form that requires critical deliberation as to its merits. Non-fungible tokens are a volatile, risky investment with little return.
At the end of the day, I’ll download that Beeple if I want it.