Caesura Roundtable: The NFT. Read the introduction here.

The demand for critique of the Art of our now-time has become so dim that it only flares up in moments where it appears as if the art world has gone mad. Lightning strikes when auctioned artworks break sale records or join the list of mega sales at art fairs (e.g., “Leonardo’s” Salvator Mundi, Cattelan’s duct-taped banana, Banksy’s shredder, Beeple’s digital mosaic), or when artworks ignite culture wars rows for either enraging or appealing to SJW, woke, politically correct audiences that toe the Democratic Party line. In both tendencies, the criticism that Art as a “problematic” commodity takes many guises, such as the problem of (who profits from) the commodification of Art. Commentators, however, actively neglect the lesson learned since the late '60s that trying to escape art’s commodification is futile, or merely a pretense, and rarely reflect on the artwork’s connection to capitalist social relations. The connection between these two tendencies — that art’s value is determined/critiqued by commodity “fetishism” or that art’s value is determined/critiqued by socio-political position-taking — is deeper than it appears at first glance. These “critical” tendencies express how much Art has become caught between being an end in itself and a means to an end. NFTs are the latest phenomenon to express this.

Even with all the financial speculation around NFTs, the point that Art’s value is determined within the parameters of a society in which commodification is the dominant form of social relations (i.e., capitalism) has too easily been abandoned for poorly defined neologisms. Rarely is there a reflection on the relation of the artwork — its form, technique, beauty, contemplativeness, incomprehensibility, and what have you — to the increasingly barbaric commodity form. 

Has the art world gone mad? No. This is business as usual. 

Caesura editors have resisted falling into the schizophrenic trap of the economy of hot takes that surround NFTs. Hot takes in general go against the ethos of a caesura. But when a few editors gathered in Miami, curious and unable to escape the realization that we might be duty-bound as critics to address NFTs, we had to consider if there’s any truth to the hype. As we meandered through the beach-side promenade down to South Beach, our various conversations ended up with slightly different versions of “well, that’s not new, and that hurts because we want something new.” 

 With all the NFT commentators and haters out there, we could not find an analysis and critique of NFTs’ position within capitalist social relations and artistic production. The fact that NFTs are practically little more than a different way of flipping new media/digital art (or that it’s basically a pyramid scheme on top of a pyramid scheme for a new financial class) has been widely addressed, and yet this is almost always accompanied by an insistence on potential. The potential so far, however, is nothing more than a platform that sells digital art outside of the commercial gallery system.

What is NFTs’ position within the course of all post-WW2 art, and how do they respond to the problem of the crisis of meaning of art since the middle of the 19th century? Lastly: are NFTs just the next stage in the regression of art and aesthetic experience, or do they hold some potential for Art’s progress?

Art historically, the NFT phenomenon needs to be positioned as the inheritor of the legacy of relational aesthetics and post-internet art, and more specifically as a phenomenon of the exhaustion of the pseudo-political art of the Trump years (the earliest NFTs are being dated to 2017). The anti-Trump Trump years muddied the waters of the problem that had acutely taken shape with relational aesthetics and net art in the '90s, much of which informed post-internet art of the Obama years. The important precedent for NFTism is DIS collective’s 2016 Berlin Biennale (BB9), titled “The Present in Drag.” This biennial marked the last chapter of post-internet art, which had been born around 2006–2008 on the basis of “a consciousness of the networks within which it exists, from conception and production to dissemination and reception,” as Karen Archey once put it. The biennial came under fire for being ironic or cynical and the big media art critics were unable to recognize DIS’s attempt to critically work through the contradictory position of art that both embodies late capitalist ideology (neoliberalism) and at the same time is a form of its critique. BB9 was a proposal to work through both the affirmative and critical role of art in late capitalism/neoliberalism. One BB9 tweet put it explicitly: “Our approach is a symptomatic reflection of global contradictions, as opposed to offering political resolutions of said contradictions.” For this critic, BB9 underscored how relational aesthetics art had become a form of cultural criticism that preserves the idea of art while trying to destroy its present manifestations as mere commodities, and post-internet artists were inheriting this problem. The potential of post-internet art after relational aesthetics was in the rejection of political and socially-engaged art, without abandoning the recognition that the present society is not what it should be. Post-internet art at its best pushed back against the notion that art has to offer political solutions for global contradictions or that it can even comprehend them. BB9 was rejected/criticized precisely because it did not hide itself behind the specter of a counter-culture, of the pseudo-politics of “a world in which investing in fiction is more profitable than betting on reality,” as one BB9 statement put it. The works in BB9 highlighted the degree to which a counterculture is no longer possible, that “political art” was nothing more than status quo propaganda, and that any form of institutional critique is immediately subsumed and capitalized on by the culture industry, stultified by the museum industrial complex and turned into little more than advertising for cities. 

This fleeting moment of recognition was abruptly terminated with the election of Trump a few months later, which brought four whole years of culture wars, unhinged cancel culture, censorship, and self-censorship. No wonder certain artists and intellectuals decided to go underground and seek refuge in alternative models like Patreon and crypto markets.  

In terms of the art market, NFTs emerged in popularity in 2020 just as galleries and museums were shutting down. It provided an opportunity to channel the frustration with the existing primary market gallery-museum system, which has been in its own crisis at least since the early 2010s, especially with regard to the mid-sized gallery and so-called “fairtigue.” This moment in 2020 was accompanied by a revival of interest in net art that had been simmering underground for a while. Jon Rafman posting old and new Google 9 eyes (2008–ongoing) images, which is a crucial bridge from net art to post-internet art, was an indication of this trend. That he was canceled only a few months later seems to have foreshadowed the coming exit of many post-internet artists to go “underground” with NFT art due to frustration with the culture wars. At the same time, some of the most important transitional figures from post-internet to blockchain and NFTs, such as Berlin-based artists Simon Denny and Daniel Keller (formerly of Aids-3D), were primed to benefit from the NFTs art market bonanza — if not financially, at least discursively. Meanwhile, Brad Troemel and Joshua Citarella, who’ve been called everything from artworld critics to trolls or disruptors, were not far behind with critical interventions, and even the likes of artist/critic/collector/curator Kenny Schacter got in on the NFT game.

The big auction houses, however, were able to jump ahead of the discontent and subversiveness of NFTs and capitalize on them with the Beeple sale, among others, due to their massive resources, which far outpace art fairs, museums, or galleries. That NFTs were mirroring the auction house bidding experience also positioned auction houses at the lead. 

NFT art was born out of a hostility towards the art market’s pseudo-politics and pseudo-tastes, a rejection of the well-administered barbarism of the art market. Troemel and Keller reacted to the pseudo-politics, Schacter to the absence of a legit platform to sell digital art, while the crypto newcomers were reacting to the art world’s elitism, shady gatekeepers, and pseudo-tastes. The barbarism of the art market is expressed in the micro-decisions of how dealers approach selling art. Daniel Keller’s (former?) dealer at KTZ does not like to use the term “post-internet” for its artists (many of whom participated in BB9, such as GCC, Katja Novitskova, Anna Uddenberg) as much as Esther Schipper does not like the use of “relational aesthetics” for hers (such as Liam Gilick, Pierre Huyghe, Philippe Parreno, et al.). It's ironic how art historical concepts seem to work against the sustainability over time of an artist’s market. The art market is a fickle chimera, but it's also extremely resilient to changes. Instead, the adopted register for valuing artists was less bound to taxonomical cohorts of “net art,” “post-internet art,” et cetera, and more focused on an artist’s “position” or “role” in the market. Vague phrases like “it was a bad position for that fair,” or “that’s a really interesting position” are ubiquitous when talking about the presentation of artworks in commercial contexts. But such fungible positioning also indicates absolute subordination to market demands. The desperate need to brand and fetishize one artistic position in order to find the right collector or curator for it requires them to be severed from their actual social relations, such as developing an artistic practice within milieu and engaging in change through mimesis. Instead, the art market’s audacious modus operandi is to discard any grounds from which to provide aesthetic judgment, since this kind of value-formation has long been in crisis, preferring to leave artworks open for “contextualization” befitting the moment, especially at the command of identity politics, as was seen in the aftermath of BLM protests, when overnight every black artist (and black business!) in America (and beyond) became the most coveted. The “non-fungible” in NFTs is the clearest indicator of this frustration with the traditional art market as the site at which the crisis of the value of art has been generated, expressed as a rejection of the universal fungibility of art. But! It was representation — alongside the independence of art gained in its commodification — that gave way to universal fungibility, which allowed for art’s autonomy to emerge. Art’s value in modernity/capitalism is always generated from without, that is, subjectively. NFTs attempt to circumvent art’s crisis of meaning, and the limits of the traditional commercial gallery system, by fetishizing that non-fungibility as its highest value, is more of an Achilles heel than a Trojan horse. Moreover, NFTs try to leap over the irreconcilable contradictions of art in late capitalism, but instead of producing new forms of Art, of aesthetic experience, they end up reproducing earlier forms of Art, such as '90s net art, but, by making them discrete/unique objects again (i.e., not infinitely reproducible), these objects lose the impetus of net art’s rejection of uniqueness and, as a result, end up recoiling back to pre-modern art-as-magic fetishes. The new media art creators that are making NFTs have staked their tent in a romantic return to the cult value of Art, such as “fandoms,” and replaced the exhibition value of Art created by the commercial gallery system.

One way the cult value of NFTs is produced is by the unique combination of NFT genres. All NFT phenomena inherit and cull from parts of the other NFT genres under their umbrella. Even though a great majority of NFTs have never and will never be exhibited IRL, their interrelationship has added value to all NFTs. So far, NFTs have been categorized to include Fine Art, hippie/Deviant/burner art, meme, sports collectibles, celebrity fandom art, and so forth. In the case of meme NFTs, the whole NFT phenomenon has inherited the pleasure in the loss of the aura and it is made explicit not only in the “defense of the poor image” or “glitch art” kind of way, but in that this is “art” whose value is being generated completely outside of itself, without any aesthetic value/judgment whatsoever, just like viral memes. While this brushes against the grain of the boring skillfulness/self-expression of the DeviantArt/burner “aesthetic,” both tendencies seem to feed off/benefit from each other, adding to the overall cult value placed on NFTs.    

Through its contradictions, NFTism may provide a dialectical image à la Surrealism, where there is a dialectic of subjective freedom in a situation of objective unfreedom. This unfreedom is expressed in the reified/stagnant artistic production of the last few (Trump) years as it has become subjected to the outmoded machinations of the traditional art market (galleries, auction houses) whilst trying to survive in the context of the crisis of neoliberalism under Trump/Brexit. The deeper problem, however, harks back not only to the post-WW2 neo-avant-garde, and its resignation from the task of freedom, but to the mid-19th century with Baudelaire as a self-critical romantic figure. All of post-Romantic Art, from Baudelaire all the way up to relational aesthetics and post-internet art, inherits the problem of academicism and that “old-fashioned” debate over art pour l’art. But the romantic resentment that Baudelaire rejected, and which avant-garde artists sought to overcome, is reinvigorated in NFTs. This runs the risk of confusing subjective freedom for a romantic cry of protest and thus failing to move past their existing creative inhibitions and raise artistic practice to greater self-awareness.

Ever since the emergence of avant-garde art, the absolute freedom of the individual/artist — expressed at the moment the commodity form of labor became universal — was shown to be petrified. Art clashed against the oppressive structure of society rigidified in academicism and the traditional art market. This contradiction is articulated by Adorno as follows: autonomous/absolute art is constituted and destroyed by commodification under capitalism. But we have gone so far down the spiral of regression, of unfreedom, in society, life, art, love, that we cannot take Adorno’s argument for the contradiction of art for granted, and we might have to entertain the problem of subjective and objective unfreedom, as it is expressed in contemporary Art and in NFTs in particular.    

I’ve appreciated the commentary and discourse created by Simon Denny, Daniel Keller, Brad Troemel, and Joshua Citarella (and all their adjacent milieu), but I do wonder if their increased commitment to discourse has impoverished their art or simply led them to stop making art. Have Daniel Keller or Brad Troemel simply stopped making art? Maybe it simply is the case that it has become impossible for these millennial artists to make art given the demands and machinations of the art market itself, in addition to the problem of subjective unfreedom and lack of self-consciousness. Sure, they are almost all still producing stuff: either memes, reports, podcasts, fancy displays for mining games/computers, websites, or various “artworks,” but I suspect that in private they might be willing to acknowledge they are not able to do what they really want to do. At best, they’ve been pushed into corners they are constantly fighting to get out of, but likely it's simply the brute competitiveness of the art market that has required them to sacrifice making good Art in order to be “successful.” Perhaps the most successful of these artists in the marketplace is Simon Denny. He is the only one of these four still consistently making something that at least appears to be Art destined for the primary market, something a critic can still truly engage. Denny is still producing artworks — aesthetic objects — that might allow for reflective judgment, a heightened feeling of its own cognitive powers, or “the feeling of life,” as Kant put it. And yet I don’t quite get that heightened feeling with Denny’s work. It’s impossible to find underneath all the layers of affirmation. Meanwhile, I find Brad Troemel’s report videos on Patreon way more compelling intellectually than Denny’s pro–Democratic Party neoliberal propaganda for the blockchain, and that’s even with Troemel’s ridiculous fake smile that makes me cringe all the way through; but maybe that’s the dissonance that I am missing in Denny’s work. 

NFTism seems to have an element that is mystifying even to those artists working closely within it. This I find to be the case with Denny’s work on crypto mining games, which makes a process that is quite objectively present in reality — even if profoundly misunderstood — into an even more obscure object of inquiry by turning it into an artwork. This increasing mystification of the machinations of late capitalism or the crisis of neoliberalism seems a cornerstone of art of the last decade (with the exception of the explosion of painting during the pandemic, which is a whole other story). It made me wonder about the deeper meaning of Adorno’s criticism, “Art is magic delivered from the lie of being truth.”

A commodity is what is most essential to modern society, to capitalism, and what is most essential is also historically specific. Its purpose is to express the elusive character of capitalism that dominates us, and capitalism is what must fundamentally change for Art to change. Is blockchain about to bring about the revolution that Lenin could not achieve? The abolition of capitalism and the abolition of the commodity form are the same thing. Blockchain leaves capitalism untouched, even adding a new form of domination even more mystifying than the last; it is little more than another version of the anarcho-capitalists’ and libertarians' dreams of living within the cracks and loopholes of capitalism, rather than anything truly transformational of the totality of capitalism. It is significant that Art, which is the most unique of all commodities, the most sensitive to the domination of capital and the decay of bourgeois society, the decay of historical consciousness, would find itself at the center of this new crisis point with the phenomena of cryptocurrencies. It's not nothing that NFTs are at the next stage of a historical process that's been developing over several decades. As I’ve been laying out, NFTs are the logical conclusion of the trajectory of 21st century art, from '90s relational aesthetics and net art to now. NFTs have not only opened the door wide open for the crypto bros’s capital to finally have something to buy, speculate, and fight over; they have shown that no matter how “decentralized” or “transparent” the whole blockchain infrastructure (or “protocol”) is, it is still a capitalist jungle, though with the delusion that the jungle is a playground. What happened with Beeple’s record-breaking sale at auction, which was bought by two crypto billionaires to inflate the value of crypto, is no different than what collectors do to inflate the price of their Andy Warhols by up-bidding new lots on the auction floor, which is illegal but nonetheless still happens. But no one in their right mind would ever say Beeble’s works are good Art, while we can argue differently with Warhol, Koons, and Hirst. 

There might be a few artists savvy enough to learn the right hustle, the loopholes, to play the right game and succeed financially through NFTs enough to gain independence from the stultifying gallery-museum system. But the conditions do not yet seem to make it possible for these artists to also produce good Art worthy of reflecting/writing about; they have certainly not outdone either Andy Warhol, Jeff Koons, or Damien Hirst in working through art’s contradictory position within the commodity form of capitalism.  

 NFTs (art, Deviant, memes, and otherwise) will end up in the same place as everything else on the internet, which is the same place as everything else in late capitalism: controlled by a few mega corporations, which the government (the state) will assist in their exploitation, surveillance, and censorship of the small/individual players. Just as the Democrats ruined social media. Signs of clashes already abound from sports stars/channels producing collectible “celebrity NFTs” that feed upon the “little guy” making Deviant/burner art NFTs, while Hermès is suing an artist for its MetaBirkins NFT on grounds of trademark infringement. NFT art cannot escape the deeper aesthetic and historical problems of working in the traditional “primary” art market, but it might give artists some appearance of independence from it, and possibly grant them the subjective freedom to truly experiment and push the boundaries of aesthetic experience.

For this critic, NFTs begged the question of the redemption of Art, but I have been left wanting, even with some more aesthetically inclined projects at the hands of curator-critic Nora Khan. What is absent in all critical conversations today, especially surrounding NFTs, is the question of Art’s value as an aesthetic experience. This loss of our capacity to see, feel, and subjectively reflect upon art as a modern (i.e., contradictory) phenomenon of aesthetic experience is at the heart of our critical impotence. This is the main reason why we have not yet seen good NFT Art.

More from Caesura Roundtable: The NFT. Bret Schneider on hyperconsonance and hyperbolic hearts. Allison Hewitt Ward on the past set ablaze and our new crypto overlords.