What can Adorno & Walter Benjamin Teach us About NFTs & Art
Blockchain technology, simply put, is an un-hackable system based on the mathematics of cryptography. Via The Conversation (Shutterstock)
There's a buzz about NFT art—digitally encrypted art—at the moment. NFTs can sell for hundreds of thousands of dollars, sometimes millions. One NFT work reportedly sold for over $69 million at Christie's art auction.
Grimes, Elon Musk, the founder of Twitter: Jack Dorsey, have all been making NFTs.
However, NFTs present significant issues.
NFTs provide a way to launder money. And Artists have reported their work being sold as NFTs without their permission. There's also an environmental cost because the encryption process uses up so much energy.
All this is done to commodify art. This raises (again) issues about the value of art, how to put a value on art, and what constitutes an original artwork. NFTs promise a new way to own art and a new way to classify works as original.
But in the age of memes and digital reproduction, should we even try to salvage the idea of the original? Should art continue to be a commodity that can be owned?
Questions about art’s commodity status emerged in the free market economy of the nineteenth century. These issues were enlivened in the early twentieth century with movements like Dada that tried to make art that was unsellable or unattractive to sell. Artists of the 1960s and ‘70s did this as well…but it seems that not much can escape the brokerage of dollars and cents.
Meanwhile, prices for (blue-chip) works of art just go up and up….
To make sense of these questions, we'll discuss the ideas of two twentieth-century Marxist philosophers: Walter Benjamin (1892–1940) and Theodor Adorno (1903–1969).
They both wrote about art, the original, and the idea of art as a commodity.
In this post, we'll deep dive into what they might have said about NFTs.
But first, let's get the lingo right. Feel free to skip the tech nerdery and get down to the art theory.
Image credit: Ethereum https://www.creativebloq.com/features/what-are-nfts
What are NFTs?
NFTs, non-fungible tokens, are basically tokens that can't be exchanged. Even though it entails using crypto-currency technologies like blockchain, NFTs can't be funged, which is a cute way of saying that they can't be exchanged. But they are also unhackable and contain information claiming their authenticity and originality—most NFTs rely on Ethereum blockchain.
NFTs are kind of like owning the digital copyright to an image, piece of music, or artwork. It's kind of like buying a code or digital signature claiming some form of ownership, no matter how reproduced it is.
An example of an NFT. Image credit: black sneakers (artist), Letting the Sun In (work)
You can trade NFTs for money, but they can't be replicated because of the encryption... Put another way, you can sell it, but it isn't a currency. It's a commodity.
We all know that art is usually worth more (in terms of money) if it is signed, right? Well, NFTs depend on a coda that distinguishes the owner of the work.
...End of tech nerdery
NFTs and the Promise of the Original
Pak's The Switch (2021) sold for $1.4 million
NFTs are hot right now. Instead of investing in a work, you invest in the work's signature, or rather token. It can be resold for quite a profit.
Hence Grimes sold a 50-second video for $390,000. And you can watch it online for free.
Likewise, Mike Winkelmann, aka Beeple, sold a digitally created video for $6.6 million.
This seems kind of weird, right?
Rainbow Cat sold for $690,000 (Image credit: Nyan Cat)
Why would anyone buy a signature when the artwork, generated digitally, can be reproduced endlessly? If I can download it, why buy it?
NFTs may imply that art is again anchored to an origin, an idea of a legitimate artwork in contrast to a copy. NFTs salvage the notion that something is unique about the artwork, turning data into a thing, an art object.
When notions that distinct genetic codes have replaced the soul—the whole "I am my genes" type of thing—a work's soul becomes its coded token.
Let me explain by referencing a philosopher named Walter Benjamin.
Benjamin on Art’s Aura
Beeple is one of the most successful creators of digital art—a work of his sold for 69 million at Christie’s. One can’t help but wonder what Benjamin might make of this work. Image credit: Image credit: Beeple / Mike Winkelmann - Everydays: The First 5000 Days
According to Benjamin, photographic reproductions of art destroy our idea of an original artwork being unique. Many of us will have seen photos of works of art that we haven't seen in person. Reproductions of art encourage us to feel like the works are ours and belong to society, even if collectors privately own the pieces.
In the past, art was an exalted commodity. It was taken for granted that art objects were unique and therefore also uniquely possessed by the art collector, museum, or gallery. Art remained distant from us. We remained enraptured spectators. It was someone else's, and often from another time.
It was worshipped, rendered sacred because of tradition.
This is why Benjamin defined the aura "as the unique phenomenon of a distance, however, close it may be." Art’s rapture is in large part due to its aura: it instils in us a pleasurable unease because we feel in the presence of something far more special than ordinary things.
With photos of works of art, we see the work differently, as it becomes democratized. And it becomes cheaply and easily exchangeable: think picture postcard.
Benjamin notes that thanks to photography and audio recording, "The cathedral leaves its locale to be received in the studio of a lover of art; the choral production, performed in an auditorium or in the open air, resounds in the drawing-room."
No longer is the work so unique or sacred or tethered to tradition. This is what Benjamin refers to as the loss of the aura.
Benjamin loved the possibilities of film, photography and mechanical reproduction. Images via Aleks Wansbrough.
The aura was tied to the idea of an original work of art—of the work of art existing nowhere else—the work of art as sacred and irreplaceable, as mysterious and in-exchangeable.
The aura surrounded the art object, the artwork as object, as a sacred object. But photography puts an end to this as it duplicates and multiplies the artwork, bringing it into a relationship with everyday life and modern technology.
While Benjamin mourned the aura, he also thought it was good that art was no longer just a private commodity. That it was shared.
With photographic technology, we see art differently, notice different things.
Benjamin writes that photography "can bring out those aspects of the original that are unattainable to the naked eye yet accessible to the lens, which is adjustable and chooses its angle at will. And photographic reproduction, with the aid of certain processes, such as enlargement or slow motion, can capture images which escape natural vision."
There's no one experience of art, as photography can enhance the experience.
Pixlpa, Active Gestures 10. Caption: Example of an NFT Insert Pixlpa, Active Gestures 10.
Given that we live in an age of internet sharing and digital manipulation, Benjamin proved prophetic. But he was also just responding to his time.
It’s difficult to realise but photography scared a lot of artists, and dealers. Just as movie and music studios worry about illegal downloads today, photography gave gallery owners and art sellers the chills.
If people could purchase a photo of a work, why buy a work? Control started to be exercised by galleries and artists to restrict reproductions. Certificates of authenticity were introduced.
Even recently artists restrict how many copies of their works are made. Matthew Barney, creator of the Cremaster video works, only created a certain number of copies of the DVDs, so as to restrict access and enhance desirability.
Matthew Barney understood the idea that taking art out of circulation would give it an aura. As such, he made only a few DVD copies of his Cremaster Cycle. Credit: Matthew Barney, Cremaster 5.
However, it also transpired that reproducibility created a new aura. The aura of celebrity around works. Copies induce a desire for the original, making the original famous. Think Mona Lisa: her image is everywhere which only makes you want to hanker after the original!
But that still leaves the problem of digital art, where art as data has no genuine or original art object.
NFTs solve this “problem” but they also seem a step back toward commodifying art, and forcing traditional ideas of authenticity and originality back on art.
Kevin Abosch, Forever Rose (2018) sold for $1 million, suggesting that there is a new aura around digital photographic reproductions.
NFTs could seem like a conservative attempt to restrict access to art, even if the works are still widely accessible.
In short, they are an attempt to resurrect art's aura by making often freely available digital works into commodities. Needless to say, this is a step back for democratization.
But thinking about NFTs gets more paradoxical than that. The constant reproductions of the work actually support the idea of an original. They reinforce that the work is desirable. "You've seen the work everywhere, but only I own it. I have its unique token."
While it could be argued that NFTs prove that the original's value is meaningless—hollowed out, empty of anything but profit, that's not really true.
Just look at how there are so many articles about NFTs and how much they sell for. The works' constant reproduction hasn't diminished their value, their aura; they've extended it.
Maybe Benjamin's analysis missed something?
His former student Theodor Adorno thought so.
Adorno's Critique of the Aura
WhIsBe, Not Forgotten, But Gone. Sold for $1 million. Art’s commodity status clearly hasn’t disappeared.
In a letter written to Benjamin in 1939, Adorno critiqued Benjamin's concept of the aura.
Adorno did agree with the basic idea that art often had an aura of tradition about it. But Adorno thought Benjamin was a wee-bit simplistic when it came to technological and photographic reproductions.
For Adorno, mechanical reproduction didn't necessarily dispel the aura.
In fact, Adorno was afraid that technology would enable the growth of an aura around artwork, leading art to be more commodified. The more reproduced the work, the more desirable and valued the original became.
Adorno gave the example of film, noting that "if anything does have an aural character, it is surely the film which possesses it to an extreme and highly suspect degree."
Grimes, “WarNymph Collection Vol. 1” $5.8 million, March 2021, Nifty Gateway
Benjamin thought that modern tech dissolved the aura. He pointed to film as a way to cut up images, framing film as a type of art without the notion of a unity.
Adorno disagreed with Benjamin’s assessment. Hollywood film, for example, uses editing not to distinguish film from life but rather to create a seamless flow, so that the viewer doesn’t even notice the cuts. Overcome by the false illusion of life, the viewer sits in awe.
Even entering a cinema is a bit like entering a sacred space, where light is projected in a darkened room, and talking is discouraged.
Likewise isn’t there a sense of awe, of mystery about the digital?
This provides a way of thinking about NFTs: we see the works, but we can't access the codes directly. Only a select few—the very wealthy—have the encrypted value.
Digital technology almost seems magical... The coding can seem out of reach, and just thinking about the amount of energy used to power the encryption process is mind-boggling.
NFTs and the Future of Art
A work by Beeple that may comment on the future of mass-produced art. Image credit: Beeple / Mike Winkelmann - He truly went to infinity and beyond
Who knows what the consequences of NFTs will be. They're pretty new. But it seems that they show that art being reproduced doesn't stop investors from finding ways to monetize art.
Even if we doubt the original's value, NFTs again have a whiff of mysticism about them. Indeed, anything digital and techy can. Digital technology is kind of mysterious and immaterial.
While Benjamin championed photography because it showed the work's material details in new ways, the digital makes the value of art seem immaterial and transcendent all over again. And instead of showing us new details, digital replication means the image is again uniform when downloaded… no matter how reproduced.
In this way, the NFT is another form of the aura, but the aura for the digital era. This new is bound to become the new normal.
