Culture Desk
November 28, 2021
Just a few weeks back, while brushing my teeth, I was doing what every zoomer does these days: scrolling through my Tik Tok explore page. Tik Tok cultivates what they believe are to be my interests and presents it in an infinite loop of procrastination. A halloween cookies tutorial here, a Netflix recommendation there, a pixelated photo of something indescribable.
I kept scrolling, but moments later, I returned to that pixelated photo. Upon a closer inspection, it was no strew of pixels but rather a collage. A beautiful collage. I was taken aback with its striking element of human emotion. Dispersed across the collage were feelings sorrow and bliss, exhilaration and depression, through an assemblage of colors – matte, shiny, glowing and dull. I could feel the technological advancement and the great written works by humans in history thundering through the borders of each photo. Styles of Warhol, Jenkins and Da Vinci, plainly visible in respective manners of portraits, spills and pop art. Clusters of pastels evoked a sense of peace as if one was in a pink hot air balloon over meadows of Lavender and ascending into the luscious white clouds of Heaven. A powerful usage of dark matter, seducing one to feel like they’re at the edge of a rowboat in the Pacific Ocean, peering into the endless beauty of the Ocean’s bioluminescence. Captivated by the New World, the Old World and the undiscovered worlds shining through in this peace of passion and emotion, I was bewildered, mystified by what I had stumbled upon.
In its description at the bottom, there was a hashtag that read only three letters: NFT.
I didn’t know what NFT’s were; I’d never even heard of them. Call me ignorant, but I’m guessing I’m not the only one. Like everything else in this rapidly advancing world, technology is reshaping virtually everything. And very soon, the technological age will be upon us.
NFT stands for Non-Fungible Tokens, which in simple terms is a form of digital art. In economics, fungibility is when the value of assets is interchangeable. This means that every NFT is different. The tokens are built on the Ethereum blockchain, which is a system of recording information that makes it very difficult to hack. (Thank you Wyatt Rexer for clarifying). There, they are verified and sold.
Before NFT’s, I could have a digital artwork of Starry Night, and you could have the same Starry Night, and there would be no way to tell the difference. With NFT’s, art is verifiable, and although phony copies can be made, the original artwork’s blue check protects its value.
This all feels so weird. How can art be sold online? Why would anyone want that?
Let’s think about the basic reasons people indulge in art. The first things that come to mind are pleasure, emotional connection, a way to sympathize, a way to feel cultured, a sense of the beautiful, the power of being overwhelmed, entranced, beguiled, transported, I mean, the list is infinite. If there is a supply and demand for NFT’s, are there any reasons that digital art can’t hold a similar meaning that physical art does?
If you ask Vignesh Sundaresan and Anand Venkateswaran, the buyers of the 69.3 million dollar NFT, they would likely hit you with an absolutely not. The Indian investors won the Christie’s London auction for the collage of 5,000 different digital photos, created by Mike Winklemann, otherwise known as Beeple.
A glimpse of Beeple’s $69.3 piece, of which I saw on Tik Tok
It was not by chance that this masterpiece was valued at its sky-high price. Beeple’s tremendous following and pknown artists prowess along with Christie’s Auction House’s booming reputation as a top art auction house both influenced the NFT’s art.
Yet there are those who are very against NFT’s. If I have the real Starry Night in my house, and you print out a picture of it at your house, the two artworks will never come close in value. Yet if I have the Starry Night NFT, will people care if they can possess the same thing on their computer too, even if it isn’t minted?
“Digital art was meant to be shared and to have a nature that is infinite,” Robynn Aviles of NT Daily reports. And the fact of the matter is that we don’t know how people will value NFT’s in the future. But we do know that the market for them is growing, every day.
I spoke with Enrique Chaug, a friend, “a crypto enthusiast,” and founder of rareinthebox.com, a NFT website of which he is no longer the owner. He entered the NFT world years ago, investing ten thousand dollars on video game skins, weapons, and other designs, and flipped his investment for a seven thousand dollar profit.
These assets can be used in the metaverse, a virtual reality, you can experience the virtual world. Alongside your friends through an augmented reality, people can see which NFT’s are yours, such as going to a museum and seeing whose art belongs to whom.
Enrique was exceedingly vocal about NFT’s inevitable rise to be more prominent than physical art. “It is just far more accessible,” he remarked, in juxtaposing the two.
Yet there is still work to be done to account for this rise. Money held in the value of the NFT can easily be lost if you lose interest or a videogame developer discontinues the game. A lot of people pay high prices for NFT’s, but eventually someone is holding a worthless bag.
Nevertheless, with its positives and negatives, Enrique was clear in his tone that NFT’s are here to stay. Robynn Aviles may disagree. And I, myself, and at the intersection of the two.
So I leave you with this: Are NFT’s the true future of art?
