Thread by @OneAdamReese

In 2019, @MPtherealMVP @flakoubay @stinalinneag published a paper called "There's No Such Thing As Blockchain Art." I fell in love with this title as soon as I heard it. (Thread on "blockchain art" in general, and Beeple/Christie's specifically.) It's a statement that conveys,

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with a wonderful directness, the point that although people from both worlds were trying to mash blockchain + art together, none of these efforts had really resulted in works that couldn't have been created in a blockchainless world.

Yes, on some conceptual level the relationship of owner-to-work-to-artist was altered once you could suddenly "own" a jpg, gif, etc. (by way of an NFT.) But for several key reasons, I believe(d) that none of the 2019 NFT art qualified as "blockchain art".

1) Arguably, the only special privileges conferred by NFT ownership were financial in nature, whereas owning a work of physical art has often entailed (among other things) privileged access to that work. For example, while I can (maybe) see one or two pictures of a physical

artwork on the internet, its owner can see the real thing from the front, back, and sides; can get up close and study it in detail. Because most works of "blockchain art" in 2019 were simple image files that could be displayed on any screen, it could be said that they were

equally accessible to anyone with a device. The only difference between the owner and the rest of the viewing public (and the only thing that distinguished these works from non-NFT digital art) was that the owner held a token which (the artist agreed) represented ownership

of the work and could sell that token at a profit/loss. Because a blockchain had been used to sell this art but not to create it, I think/thought of it as "art sold on the blockchain" rather than "blockchain art".

2) The most exciting (arguably) use case that NFTs were said to offer to working artists had not been fulfilled in a meaningful way by 2019. It had been suggested that a musician would be able to record a song and if it blew up, or was sampled in a song that blew up, they could

receive value-per-engagement just by holding the corresponding NFT. Ditto for someone's visual designs being picked up by an ad campaign, by a more famous artist, etc. The rails for such a system may have been built in some form, but in 2019 not enough people were using any of

these systems enough for them to serve as viable primary income sources for many working class artists. If "blockchain art" was supposed to be "smart" art, then this art could not be called blockchain art—it was more on the dumb side. At most, it could hope to be smart one day.

3) Although it might not be fair to characterize the Beeple sale in this light, most NFT markets to date have been, at their heart, investment markets. I don't deny that there's been a genuine mixing of people's sense of beauty/inspiration with their desire to make money. But

from where I'm standing, it looks like profit seeking has been the engine (it certainly was in 2019) and the idea that it's possible to profit from one's art-liking acumen (one's taste) is a bonus—a nice little ego boost. Let's recall that in 19, a good chunk of what was being

billed as "blockchain art" were images that (I might be so bold as to suggest) affirmed the worldview of the buyer by incorporating the 'logo' of the blockchain on which the NFT was being minted into the design. These sales—like the sales of all NFTs back then and even still

today—were cited as evidence that blockchain technology, which had long been assailed as a solution in search of a problem, *does* have practical use cases after all (to wit, art sales.) (And again, note the affirmation of worldview.) In this light, spending big on any NFT at

that time could be seen as an act of goodwill towards the whole cryptosphere: sacrificing one's much needed—and back then badly devalued—capital to prop up the flagging public image of an increasingly dismissed space. In other words, just as much as an NFT sale represented an art

purchase, it was equally an act of demonstrating confidence in crypto for the (perceived) good of all in the space. I should add, though, that these sales *were* art sales. When someone bought/buys an NFT, even as an act of mixed magnanimity/grandiosity, one imagines that

something personal or idiosyncratic informed their particular choice of artwork, perhaps even their very decision to buy a tokenized artwork. The buyer considers it art; the creator considers it art; it is art. But as I've argued, tying an artwork to a digital asset doesn't

necessarily make "blockchain art" a thing.

Now, based on these three metrics, which are basically my reaction to the 2019 piece mentioned at the top of this thread, can we say that blockchain art definitively exists in the wake of the Beeple/Christie's sale? Let's see.

According to metric 1, Beeple's piece and its sale don't change anything. The public can see the work in the same glorious detail that the NFT holder can, and the blockchain only comes into play where the buying and selling of the NFT are concerned.

And by metric 2, again, this development changes nothing. We've recently seen a wave of people making fast money (or trying to) off NFT-related stunts, but as far as I know there has been no wave of artists/musicians newly able to consistently make rent thanks to some kind of new

-fangled smart art technology. The hardest call is how to apply metric 3. Certainly, it's not a slam dunk that the buyer would turn a profit after paying the massive sum the work sold for, so especially without knowing their motives, we cannot characterize this purchase as an

intended investment. If the buyer really does have that kind of ETH, then one imagines they're a whale with an ideological (if not financial) reason for wanting to promote the space. This would suggest that the buy is an ad stunt, but again we don't know. To better answer the

question of whether this was simply a blockchain enabled art sale or an actual instance of "blockchain art" that couldn't have happened without the existence of a blockchain, it might be useful to consider the piece itself, and the context around the auction:

We have a piece of visual art that is chock full of memes, with a title that memetically invokes David Graeber, a late public intellectual who believed deeply in anarchy and was a tireless critic of the effects of speculative behavior. It sold for a record shattering price.

The amount works out to a nice memorable number when denominated in ETH, a currency that many people understand by way of memes. The sale took place against the backdrop of a pump that's sucking in capital from new crypto users around the world, including in the Global South

(Graeber cared a lot about the people of the Global South.) Meanwhile, the sale is likely to further drive the influx of noob money, including from the Global South

I'll leave it to the professional art critics to pick apart everything that's going on there, but as to whether or not this qualifies as an example of blockchain art: I don't know? Maybe there are enough different threads being pulled together here that it somehow does?

Regardless, it's some next level memecraft

Yeah... I'd thought about asking people to shout out "real blockchain art" projects but I got lazy after all that writing (and frankly a little wary of inviting shilling.) But fuck it let's hear em

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