The prevailing myth of Bitcoin’s enigmatic founder posits that “Satoshi Nakamoto” is the pseudonym of a group of developers who aspired to create a digital currency that could exist beyond the control of government, banks, and third parties. Together they generated a currency that could be stored as code, verified by a massive, shared, peer-to-peer network of transactions performed on computers around the world. These on-chain transactions are constantly secured with cryptographic proof.
Proof, in this case, has always been imperative for the authentication, management and distribution of art in a global market. Scarcity was central to the commodification of traditional art long before our current fascination (or revulsion) with NFTs. The entire art industry, so to speak, has been supported by expert appraisers, registers, and other means of record keeping to assess ownership, preservation, provenance, and condition. In the printmaking trade, “artist’s proof” historically refers to the impression of the first impression, taken to determine the condition of the plate, wood block, or other surface. In modern practice, however, artist’s proof often denotes the first completed work identical to other numbered editions. This methodology has been developed slowly and meticulously over hundreds of years.
When we look at our present moment – how we have rapidly evolved from the printing press to photography to the internet – it is clear that the internet has introduced a whole new set of complications when it comes to claiming proof of ownership. or maintain that anything is an “original”. In the early 1990s, the World Wide Web entered our homes, and for the very first time, we were able to come together across geographical boundaries and freely share information on a global network. As a result, we were all editors, without signatures. And while concepts like ownership and signatures have been applied to entities in the physical world like works of art, deeds, or leases, they have continually eluded us in our digital spaces. Watermarks, copyrights, DRMs and DMCAs offered clumsy and inelegant solutions for enforcing digital rights. But at the end of 2020, NFTs were introduced to the general public. The term NFT, short for Non-Fungible Token, has been regularly misinterpreted as shorthand for a variety of unrelated topics, from GIFs and cryptocurrencies to glossy 3D renders or massive sets of PFP artwork.
As a cryptographic unit for record keeping, an NFT can be considered analogous to a signature or autograph. What NFTs offer artists is a simple digital property signifier – one that uses blockchain encryption to link a token (much like a certificate of authenticity) to a digital object, such as a generative work of art, text or a photograph. Hitting an NFT creates a publicly verifiable and traceable record, the provenance of which is stored on-chain, and is therefore virtually impossible to tamper with. On a widely distributed Internet, whose architecture has become largely predetermined by a few monolithic tech giants, artists who produce work and share creations online now have a tool to verify that they own their content ( and maybe, for the first time, they can even benefit from this content).
For decades, artists have been dreaming up new ways to record and authenticate their potentially “intangible” creative output. As an example, we can turn to the history of conceptual art: the wall drawings of Sol Lewitt, for example, only attribute the instructions for the realization of the works, or the “Zone of Immaterial Pictorial Sensibility” (1959) by Yves Klein, the form documents for property rights to empty space. More recently, Rafaël Rozendaal’s Art Website Sales Agreement (2011-2014) was used to verify the sale of browser-based artworks, each tied to a particular domain name. The contract details the transfer of electronic data and exhibition files necessary for the operation of the website to its new owner.
Since the arrival of NFTs, many artistic interventions have emphasized the general aura of epistemic vibrations involved in the creation and collection of purely digital assets. ‘The Currency’ (2021) by Damien Hirst featured a collection of 10,000 NFTs corresponding to 10,000 original artworks by the artist, each an individual ‘dot’ painting carefully signed by Hirst and stamped with a watermark, microdot and hologram. For a period of one year, buyers could choose to keep the NFT or exchange it for its physical counterpart. After the year, the one that the buyer did not claim – painting or NFT – would be destroyed. The result of Hirst’s unconventional experiment was a total of 4,851 NFTs and 5,149 paints retained.
Smart contracts (coded instructions used to issue transactions on the blockchain) and associated NFT metadata have opened up even more possibilities for artistic intervention and signing. Ryder Ripps’ Provocative NFT Collection, RR/BAYC, uses smart contracts that contain the same URLs embedded in the Bored Ape Yacht Club’s NFT Collection smart contracts. RR/BAYC intentionally satirizes the extremely prolific and highly valued PFP series as a whole. The artists also added their own unique signatures, images, and decorations to customize the smart contracts themselves, in the form of ASCII art. Rhea Myers’ concept work, “Is Art” (2014/15) is an Ethereum contract that was tasked with declaring itself a work of art or not a work of art; the contract status remains until the next transaction is sent to modify it. In the summer of 2022, Anika Meier and Operator presented a concept series titled Unsigned, which features a selection of signatures from 100 artists who identify as women. The project aims to draw attention to the well-known gender disparities in the art world; as reported by Helen Gorrill in The Guardian, works signed by men increase in value, whereas works signed by women tend to lose value over time.
NFTs have been the site of ostensible development, innovation and creativity, also associated with speculation, hype and volatility. Instead of delivering on its original promise to overthrow or challenge the existing art world, the NFT market has replicated some of its craziest asymmetries. The margin of buyers and sellers who take advantage of these digital economies is reduced by power dynamics such as access to technology and intimate knowledge of market trends. The nascent medium is already falling prey to obfuscation and manipulation in a realm governed by “evidence” and scarcity. If a non-fungible token is actually the signatureand not the artworkso much of our current cultural lexicon does not seriously represent the difference between owning the item and owning the certificate.
If we zoom out and look at this phenomenon through a much broader lens, it begins to appear that we have taken a step closer to the hyper-financialization of the internet and the consolidation of wealth. But somewhere on the horizon, just beyond all the speculative fervor, we might begin to see a trace of potential in this new tool for composing identities, establishing ownership, and fostering new forms of online collaboration. Many artists, including Damien Hirst, Anika Meier, Ryder Ripps, and Rhea Myers, have already started giving a glimpse of what it might look like.
