Metropolitan Museum of Art
Ancient Rome, by Giovanni Paolo Panini, 1757
Long before the advent of non-fungible tokens, some advocates of digital art argued that there is no meaningful distinction between a “virtual” object and a “physical” one. Such a division, they believed, partakes of the fallacy of “digital dualism,” the imprecise belief that a file is somehow less “real” than a painting on canvas, when in fact both are products of mind and time accreted to the permanence of matter. Less arty or newfangled is the old law of property. A contract is a ghost story for adults: It turns vaporous whatevers—labor time, carbon, pixel—into a coin struck by the handshake of exchange and the creep of law. Ownership was always a song and a dance and a fusillade.
Now, cryptocurrency evangelists, like the social media billionaire Winklevoss twins, have announced with NFTs a radical “liberation” of art. Taking to Twitter on March 21, Cameron Winklevoss inveighed:
NFTs liberate art. Traditional art is confined to time and space. You have to be in the right city, go to a museum, be invited to someone's home, etc. Anyone, anywhere with an Internet connection can view NFTs and take them in. This is a huge breakthrough
A perspective adequate to evaluating all such pulpit palpitations about NFTs would find nothing new here. NFTs are essentially contracts for the sale and ownership of what amounts to a link. Generally, this is even less than a privative right to a digital object—typically JPEG or TIFF image files, formats created in 1992 and 1986, respectively. The works to which NFTs correspond are stored elsewhere, on an independent database that is marginally more secure than Dropbox or Google Drive (the origins of all such distributed systems date to the 1960s).
Chances are, if the trust and depositary services of the Bank of New York Mellon go offline, your NFT IOU art, with its algorithmic insinuation of a message in a bottle cradled clammy by the Fort Knox digits of a million nerds, is probably kaput, too. What’s more, Cameron Winklevoss’s Silicon Valley hype regurgitates on behalf of NFTs the digital marketing chat of “traditional art” itself. His is the verbatim lingo that museums and galleries have used to justify their digital expenditures for over a decade. The art museum’s “authority in the future,” Tate Gallery director Nicolas Sirota inveigled in 2009, depends on its ability to harness the web to “address audiences across the world—a place where people across the world will have a conversation.” (To be fair, the brothers Winklevoss weren’t always sour on “traditional art”; they invested in Paddle8, an online auction house bankrupted last year.)
The point is not to lament art’s proximity to lurid surplus or the machinations of finance—just ask 15th-century Florence.
Nothing-new knowingness aside, what the media cycle on the NFT froth has thus far overlooked—if I may plagiarize the God of Genesis—is that everything is fungible, and everything will be taken away. Yet the notion that art is somehow more permanent or accessible when it is governed by an electronic contract that points you to a download link had me considering a more actionable matter: Are NFTs “liberating” anything or again reminding us of the total privatization of cultural permanence as a social decision made by human beings? The notion that art is safer or more accessible on the blockchain, i.e. in machines, forgets that art is not a gold tablet; it is a history of images, an activity of the people who make and give meaning to it over time. As far as art is concerned, durability, permanence, or accessibility are social issues long before they can become technical figments. The relevant social institutions for the perpetuation and transmission of art in the United States are museums and educational institutions, and both are in grim shape.
So: Forget NFTs, readers of The American Prospect are better off querying the IRS on the abject state of its enforcement of the nonprofit code in relation to art museums and universities (like Harvard, alma mater of Winklevosses). These are officially permanent cultural institutions that every American pays for every day, not just the “better” half of them that own investment securities of any kind.
At the core of this question is how nonprofit institutions work, in parallel to the commercial world, as in principle “independent” space that is tax-exempt but very much awash with the rule of capital. These structures are at this point institutions of straw, having already been hollowed by the failure of the system of private patronage by tax exemption that produced them, at least in the United States. This structural matter is upstream from the critics’ sneers about content, be it at Beeple or balloon dogs. The point is not to lament art’s proximity to lurid surplus or the machinations of finance—just ask 15th-century Florence. What matters is whether art is able to convince the societies to which it belongs that it is a worthwhile activity to subsidize or incorporate at collective scales, and to continue doing so once it has.
The garish media response to NFTs shows that the idea of art has become structurally indistinguishable from Silicon Valley business plans.
NFTs are canary minders of this fiscal and conceptual crisis facing cultural institutions. It is indisputable that in recent years even the most neoliberal bargains of cultural philanthropy with finance have become a farce, setting aside belief in the validity of private patronage. These are Faustian contracts on the blockchain of nonprofit directors and their so-called trustees, LLC artists who travel by the jalopy Gulfstream of carried interest and the infinite runway of nonprofit incorporation. The already nominal independence of educational and cultural nonprofits generally, and art museums in particular, has been beggared by decades of the Internal Revenue Service’s dereliction of the nonprofit code and barely legal self-dealing by institutional fiduciaries. This planned dereliction has been carried out not just by Republican tax policy but with all the daylight stupor of a DNC lawn game.
Related to this is the declining interest in the historical study of art itself, even among the middle and upper classes. As art ascended to ever bigger bucks on auction blocks, and museums metastasized globally, the overall number of people stably employed to engage in independent research and write about art—in museums, universities, and in the press—has declined precipitously. Student interest has, understandably, followed suit. In one bellwether incident, Barack Obama found himself extolling the skilled trades at a Wisconsin General Electric factory in 2014 by advising go-getters against the study of art history. He later apologized, writing that “art history was one of my favorite subjects in high school.” (GE announced the closure of that plant the following year.)
Basilica of Our Lady of Carmel
The Tribute Money, by Masaccio, 1425
At most art museums, already plutocratic to begin with, curators are increasingly dragooned into fundraising. At Harvard, the number of students majoring in art subjects has fallen by nearly half over the past decade. In the history of art, this meant an already marginal 62 majors in 2008 became 35 in 2019. The term “art” graces one other department, Art, Film, and Visual Studies, recently renamed after having gone under the more esoteric “Visual and Environmental Studies.” It was rumored that this change was prompted by Malia Obama’s keyword confusion that Harvard did not offer art classes. Whether or not this is true is beside the point: The subject was more popular under its artless name, when it numbered 80 majors in 2008 against 48 in 2019. These two departments amount to about 1 percent of Harvard’s total undergraduate enrollment, and are representative of the decline in the study of art (and other humanities subjects) in the Ivy League. Elsewhere, the situation is too bleak to print. If present trends hold, the critical, historical study of art will need to find new forms, or at least new hosts and new audiences.
It’s in this way that NFTs have been held out as a balm for art institutions whose philanthropic capture has lately been tweaked by the PR crises endemic to plutocratic patrons and further revenue-strapped by the pandemic. Some museums, despite much controversy, have moved toward the deaccession of artworks to fund operations. The art dealer and impresario Kenny Schachter recently suggested that in lieu of deaccessions, museums simply sell NFTs of the millions of artworks they never display, a gambit so avoidant of the real structural problem confronting these institutions that it is assured great popularity with museum directors nationwide.
Such NFT indulgences paper over the economic root of the problem: collectors’ power to race serious museums (those with a nominal firewall between funding and thinking) to the bottom of a pit called “private museum.” This trend, which dates in part to a 2006 revision of the tax statutes allowing collectors to hang onto gifted works in their homes, has been widely documented in the press for over a decade. Less clearly discussed, beyond the uncouth brazenness of private museums, is the damage they have caused to the independence of museum professionals, who now not only have to compete with other museums for donations but also with collectors themselves in this fresh calculus of personal avarice. The IRS’s refusal to meaningfully police these DIY tax sheds has turned already frazzled curators into nearly full-time fundraisers. The rot is asymmetrically distributed: Museum director salaries have outpaced inflation while the wages and intellectual freedom of everyone else at the museum—and the integrity of its “permanent” collection—spirals down.
Of course, a museum is not a collection of JPEGs. It is not even a collection of artworks, any more than a university or library is a pile of books. It is an employer and host of the people who give their time to making meaning of art as a historical form of human experience, thought, and action.
The garish media response to NFTs shows that the idea of art has become structurally indistinguishable from Silicon Valley business plans. The NFT industrialists should be credited for having understood, consciously or not, that the actual social system for evaluating the rigor and acuity of art is weak, and can be piñata’d with canards about “time and space,” or accusations of “elitism” honed by people who went to Harvard because they despise the future of reading and looking almost as much as—or, perhaps, because—they despise everyone else.
