The NFT’s thing is a cul-de-sac in the short, medium and most-epecially the longterm, but if you are looking to get involved in something and want to thumb your nose at the planet like its neoliberal 1999, whilst feeling C21, then this is totally the direction to go in, as you park your car against the end of the road and go around and around that small circle feeling like your travelling some ways.
I didn’t expect to bump into one of my interests, but the non-origin or metaphysics of the work of art is one of my interests, alongside Flame, obv. I don’t expect to bump into them both (theories of art and usage of Flame) but I happily see them both colliding here, and joining up as strange mutated nodes. There are those meditations upon works of art such as Walter Benjamin’s seminal “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” and Martin Heidegger’s “The Origin of the Work of Art” or “The Age of the World Picture,” but I find Derrida’s The Truth in Painting or Signature Event Context to be the most applicable and appropriate in picking apart or “deconstructing” ideas of originary art works that can be guaranteeed under a signature and tethered to some origin. These two texts are very strong on upsetting the applecart of beliefs in some “whole” art that can not be reproduced, copied, mutated, etc. You can think of that scene out of Nolan’s The Prestige which is basically a “carbon copy” of the Star Trek transporter thought experiment about the human soul, which I think disproves, rather than (a)proves of it as an idea/l. You beam from one place to another but then find that you are looking back at yourself on the screen from the place of origin. You see you’ve not really been beamed but really faxed. You’re physical “beingness” has not really been beamed but really scanned and then “reconstructed” at the other end. Problem is, the “original” was not destroyed and this new you, that you are “experiencing” that feels exactly the same as the one at the other end, has not been “rubbed out” but has survived (edited: not survived as in singular, but not been disposed of as a copy of an “original”). There are now two of you feeling just as “original” as each other and would perhaps fight it out to survive, like you are each the other’s worst enemy!
With Derrida’s idea of The Parergon (taken from Kant) there is the proof that each work of art needs a frame, or an auxillery to be “taken” as the work of art. The work needs an “edge” needs a guarantee to be taken as such (institutions, apparatuses, technologies) and hates, as it were, that it cannot be itself without the support of something outside itself. Every artist seems to desire some idea/l of being “singular” but they have to live offf the life support of instututions (not just critics, history, but everything outside themselves).
The NFT, whatever its environmental cost, is simply an old fashioned idea and a “digital” thing or copy that wishes to be analogue, wishes to be tethered to some source. One day, as all must, those sources will be switctched off. I am not talking about turning off servers but the ideology. Once people question (and you don’t need Derrida to help you on this) this “truth in NFT"s” and people move on, you’ll find the value depreciating. Where can you go to guarantee the metaphysics of your NFT"s. Like some investment in a limited company, you will not be able to go to the person who sold you the art (and that’s interesting as a move in conceptualising the NFT) as they were not guaranteeing true ownership, now you find yourself without that guarantee!
Like some have been saying, it’s just the latest grift and will not last too long before it moves back into the shade and becomes a historical phenemomenon. This latest blending of art and commerce is interesting as a phenomenon, as an “artefact on an artefact” but it is not any gold standard.
I’ve been keeping up a little on this NFT thing (I wrote a review of a book submission on a board I’m on) and I cannot believes that it’s not already gone the way of sub-prime mortgage scams. I think a lot is going to get written on this ship, once quite a few people start getting off it.
The original idea of collaboration is a good one, and if you want to use it as a venue support, then it sounds healthily (apart from burning more graphic card cores, and there’s no such thing as renewables according to that second law of thermodynamics) restricted within the ambit of an interest group, but if you want some idea of some work of art being tethered to some longevity of guanteed immutable permanent presence, then I’d be very wary of this NFT thing as thing of singular beauty?
Cheers
Tony
