I’m such a boomer. I have been involved in technology for many years and I don’t even own an NFT. My son looks at me perplexed: he is 12 years old and has several. He didn’t buy them, he made them. He went to a site that helps you create cryptoart, built a fun image, made it unique by recording it on the blockchain, and put it up for sale on OpenSea. Why on OpenSea ?, I asked him. Because he didn’t ask me for commissions, he told me adding that he had refused several offers in Ethereum, a cryptocurrency, because obviously I don’t allow him to make transactions online.
I said, I’m really a boomer. Yet I have been following and studying NFT as a phenomenon for a while: I too was struck by the sudden explosion of the market, a surge similar to the curves of the coronavirus waves. Exponential. Looking at the graphs while we were locked in the house for a lockdown, we all suddenly became infected with this strange fever. What was the “patient zero?”. In this case, tracing the beginning is easy.
It was February 2021, a year ago, and one of the most renowned auction houses had put up for sale not a painting or a sculpture, but a digital file by an artist called Beeple. Now, the characteristic of digital is that it can be reproduced perfectly with a couple of clicks: copy and paste, more or less, and it’s done. You make two clicks and of that file there are infinite identical copies whose value is therefore zero. This phenomenon had been investigated many years before there was the Internet by a German sociologist, Walter Benjamin, in the essay “The work of art in the era of its reproducibility”.
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The mass media was taking its first steps – in the 1930s – and Benjamin noticed that when you copy it, a work of art loses something: it loses itsaura. With digital this observation has become a prophecy. Until last March when the digital file auctioned by Christie’s was sold for 69 million dollars. How was this possible? Thanks to having transformed that file that everyone can copy into something unique, a Non Fungible Token.
In fact, an NFT is a certified copy. And therefore with a value. The intuition is not of today but of May 2014: the word Nft did not yet exist and a New York artist, Kevin McCoy, he decided to record on a blockchain (there are many) the work he had created, Quantum, the hypnotic video of a fluorescent octagon that transforms itself with circles, arcs and other geometric shapes. He did not do it by chance, he will say later: but because he was looking for a way to make that file unique and therefore salable, traceable, exchangeable. Something someone could one day claim ownership of. In the words of Brian Eno, one of the very few artists who has so far resisted the temptation to make a Non Fungible Token: “With NFT, even artists can become little capitalist assholes.” An authoritative but largely minority opinion, it should be added.
Let’s go back to McCoy, the first to do a NFT. He was way ahead of his time, but then his time came: last summer, when NFTs became a $ 40 billion market (2021 transaction value), his Quantum was auctioned at Sotheby’s. and sold for 1.4 million dollars, by a man who calls himself “Sillytuna”, Tuna Dumb, who during the same auction sold an NFT of his crypopunk collection for 11.8 million dollars. Do you understand the figures?
In the meantime, this thing with similar mechanisms has left the world of art to enter that of fashion, music, cars and sports: have you noticed the advertising in our football stadiums? They are almost all startups that promise fans to sell them new experiences in the form of NFT. While in the United States for some time the NBA has created a special site to sell the clips of the best plays in the form of NFT.
This thing obviously goes in the direction of what Mark Zuckerberg he brilliantly called metaverse, a new way of experiencing the internet, the Web3, towards which all Silicon Valley investors are pointing: a virtual place to pay in cryptocurrencies and finally exhibit your NFT, whether they are paintings, clothes or cars. Will it end like this, will we end up like this? I don’t know, but I know it’s a fashion that’s hard to resist. For example, in March I will try to win my first NFT: the novel Twentieth century read by Alessandro Baricco. I’m such a boomer.