Addressing the oft asked question of what are NFTs, I would like to approach not from the technologist view, but rather from the stance of a speculative futurism in art and cultural theory. What do they do for us now? What may they usher forth in the future? Why did they appear in time? Here are three theories.
- An NFT can establish simulated near-physicality for a digital object or idea.
We are moving into a future that seems likely to be strongly digital. Potentially it may become totally digital; the Dyson sphere, quantum computing and neural link potpourri allowing humanity to experience the nirvana or hell of a trillion VR poly-verses. In those spaces, now and in the future, we need a way to intimate the essence of physicality that is not merely sensory, should we want a truer simulation. What I mean by that is that physicality can be simulated in ways that are not essentially sensation; about sight, touch, hearing, etc., but about other qualities that we interpret as physical, too. Some of these qualities are made possible by NFTs.
NFTs, which exist in the consensus space of the blockchain, map the accrued agreement between human endpoints that an object does exist: they exist because we understand them together to exist. By being verified on the consensus layer of Ethereum (or other, lesser chains) NFTs attain reality to a degree previously unknown to digital objects. The obverse of this is also why phantasms only partially exist for us in the real world. Spirits do not observe consensus in real life. Thus, they are considered ghosts. By NFTs existing with digital consensus, just as a chair might in physical reality (the thing in itself) we get to experience them as fundamentally real in ways not seen previously in informatic space. Thus, we can posses them, we can interpret them as objects within an accumulating digital fundament, we can believe in them as real.
2. NFTs charge informatic instances with Benjamin’s Aura, and value accrues as expected there.
The above mentioned effect of a simulated near-physicality allows us to associate Aura with the NFT. In art parlance, the Aura was Walter Benjamin’s way of describing the phenomenon that an original object is more experientially charged and valued than its reproduction. For instance a painting that is then photographed and printed is qualitatively preferred. The painting, for Benjamin, includes a palpable sense of its history and cultural relevance in a way that the later print never can. It is a holding place for the actions-in-time that produced the painting, and emanates that memory as a tether to the moment for those that behold or own it. This is the value that we sense when we encounter a great work, a connection to the temporal which is otherwise intractable to human kind.
NFTs, by the efforts of #1 above, can also do this. Like paintings, they also stand as an ineffable marker of occurrence in time and space. By their hash on the block chain, they are irrefutable, and this establishes deep report for viewers and holders. They can obtain Benjamin’s Aura, even through a web browser. Though I would never be so bold to think that we can currently square the experience of being face to face with a Rembrandt (the smells, the surface of the paint, etc.) to that of viewing an NFT in your browser, I can sense the encounter with an NFT as a low hum of feeling in the digital space. This is true even with the very low aesthetic experiences of NFTs today, usually a .png or .gif on a website that represents a moment of artistic assessment and channel of a moment in time. When entering a gallery in Decentraland, I feel this effect heightened slightly — something about the 3D representation and the way that the NFT owner’s care is established, through lavish 3D models of exotic museums to house them. I can only imagine the levels my son may experience this feeling through one day, within the new digital mediums he will encounter.
3. NFTs may mark the end of materiality in art, beginning of a period of symbolic dominance.
As an art student, I had certain older faculty who would often initiate a mid-century theme that I can only think of as abstract material fetishism. Moved by treatises surrounding the minimalist works of artists like Mark Rothko, Richard Serra, or abstract art overall, they would often wax poetic about the vital need to invoke materiality in painting and other mediums. Something like the importance of “paint for paint itself” rings in my mind from that time, and my works from then bore their verses — globby, palate knife heavy, attempting to alchemize my own symbolic drive with the essence of that notion. Other artists seemed to me to be struggling with the same, such as Dana Shutz or the entire movement of Unmonumental sculpture. I don’t begrudge this idea, but I could feel it withering on the vine even as I tried to accommodate it. It is an outgoing tide in a moment where information density is rising, and even more recent painters, like Emily Mae Smith (to name one of a trendy many), seem to have eschewed the idea for glistening faux realisms.
NFTs finally release us from this burden, as well as many associated with it. We are faced, instead of material, a new medium that is information native and material agnostic. There is no material in the NFT, no paint to encounter, no conditions of display. Instead, the NFT evokes a primary drive to remain symbolic and embrace the symbolic, which is the only domain of the informatic. This can be seen in meme related works, obviously, which are essentially symbols within a cultural flux, but also can be seen in more wide reaching and tender works of NFT art. The desire to communicate the human form, the machine, fantasy icons, etc., is strong in NFTs. We are surrounded with symbolic qualities, and webs of meaning are woven densely within and between them. Even iterative repetition works, such as the HashMasks or CryptoPunks, are indebted to a hermeneutics of symbolic forms to concoct their rarities. I don’t think this is a mistake, but rather an sign of the plausible renegotiation of our total lexical space, as the digital sphere becomes more and more our reality.