The Mona Lisa has the highest insurance value for a painting ever. But the postcard copy of the Mona Lisa you bought in the Louvre gift shop is hardly worth the paper it’s printed on. Botticelli’s Primavera draws throngs of tourists to Florence’s Uffizi Gallery, but no one is rushing to your house with a selfie stick to look at the version you ordered from Amazon. Why is that?
These questions have long-plagued art theorists. First it was the advent of the printing press, allowing us to mass-produce books; then cameras came along; then primitive musical recording technology in the late 1800s; then social media platforms like Twitter and Instagram. All of these developments have allowed us to reproduce and share art on a mass scale. But somehow the value of the originals persist: an Instagram post of Guernica is no substitute for the real thing.
Philosopher Walter Benjamin mused on this in his prophetic essay, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, 1935. He reckons the appeal of an original object comes down to an “aura” (how New Age!). What he is trying to describe is an ineffable quality to the work that can only be experienced in its original form; a transcendental beauty it holds; and the cachet it draws by surviving as a historical artefact.
This is fantastic news for the hyper-exclusive and elitist art world that exists only thanks to exorbitantly (and over-inflated) priced art works. If reproductions diminished the value of the paintings they sell then Instagram would have killed their racket in the blink of an eye.
But these questions – that go deep to the heart of what art is, why we care about it, and how we ascribe it with value – have emerged with a renewed urgency in recent months. There is a new kid on the block forcing us to confront our unresolved questions about art and the industry: non-fungible tokens (bear with me).
NFTs are essentially proof of digital ownership of a thing, it could be anything: a video, a tweet, an animation. Think of it as a new method of collecting and purchasing art, except the art is not the sort you would find adorning the walls of the National Gallery, but rather the sort of thing you find after plumbing the depths of Twitter.
It sounds confusing because it is. And the art world is struggling to keep up with this rapidly evolving scene threatening to upset traditional methods on which art is bought and sold and made. Twitter founder Jack Dorsey’s first ever tweet was sold as an NFT for $2.9 million (€2.4 million) on Tuesday. The tweet reads: “just setting up my twttr.” The purchaser has likened it to the Mona Lisa. And only a few weeks ago the world’s most prestigious auction house Christie’s held its first ever digital-only auction, with the artist Beeple raking in $69 million (€58.3 million).
Why on earth would anyone pay so much for a tweet? Even granted the historical weight that the tweet bears (something we should not underestimate so readily) it seems a ludicrous use of money: you and I can still access the tweet whenever we want to, we can print it out and post it all over our walls if we were so inclined, we could even retweet it on to our own timelines and save $2.9 million while doing so. Buying the tweet appears to grant the purchaser with nothing beyond the right to boast about owning it.
But as mind-boggling and abstract as all this sounds, NFTs are not the first time this kind of thing has happened. In 2019, artist Maurizio Cattelan exhibited a banana duct taped to a wall. When the art work was destroyed (eaten, in fact) in a stunt, the gallery director was quick to assure everyone nothing was really damaged. “He did not destroy the art work. The banana is the idea,” he said. The idea of this banana was sold to a collector for $120,000 (€101,000).
There is nothing more ludicrous about purchasing the ownership of a tweet than there is in purchasing the idea of a banana, of course. NFTs are simply hard to reckon with because new technology seems daunting and strange.
As with the banana and with the tweet, we ought to be reminded once again of Benjamin’s words. The aura that comes with something’s original form is a quality that is almost impossible to describe, but it is certainly there. It is why copies of paintings do little to undermine the value of the real thing; and why an original Gutenberg bible would set you back millions despite the bible being the most printed and sold book in the world.
It is very easy to laugh at the absurdities of the art world. They probably deserve it. But what NFTs have done is force us to consider something more about the foundational importance of art: what do we like about it and why do we want to own it? If that’s all this latest development achieves it’ll be a good thing.