Thea Belton
Picture this. You walk into the Louvre and head straight to the Mona Lisa. You join the throng of people craning to see the world-famous Da Vinci painting. They have travelled hundreds of miles, just as you have, to catch a glimpse of the 77×53 cm image that has been described as the “best known, most visited, the most written about” piece of art in the world. But you possess something that everyone else here does not. While anyone can claim to have held a moment in front of that notoriously enigmatic expression, only you possess the bragging rights to ownership of it.
Well, not quite. But as close as you can get to owning the painting that has the highest known insurance valuation in history at $100 million. This is because you have purchased an NFT (non-fungible token) of Da Vinci’s masterpiece, and you can show off your digital copy of it (better, of course, than the thousands of google images you can get) at the dinner table with your friends.
This is all hypothetical of course. The Louvre has not started selling NFTs of the Mona Lisa. But we’re not far off. Russia’s State Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg announced in July 2021 that it will auction off tokenized versions of five famed artworks from its collection: Leonardo da Vinci’s Madonna Litta (1490); Giorgione’s Judith (1504); Vincent van Gogh’s Lilac Bush (1889); Wassily Kandinsky’s Composition VI (1913); and Claude Monet’s Corner of the Garden at Montgeron (c. 1876).
The sale is set to take place at the end of next month on the Binance marketplace. The idea is to “provide a new level of accessibility to the Hermitage’s collections” and “emphasize the importance of digitalization as a new stage in the realm of collecting artworks,” according to the museum’s announcement.
For those of you who don’t know, NFTs are a way of buying a digital good that represents a real-world object, usually art, in the form of a unique digital token living on a blockchain. Essentially, you can purchase some clip art of a rock for the price of a house if it is sold to you by the right artist. They were started to support struggling artists but have quickly become an exclusive stock-purchasing industry that is generating billions of dollars. You might question their rising popularity, considering that an original painting is noticeably different from a copy, whereas a digital piece of art will always be the same as the original. They essentially give you the flex of owning a piece of digital art and access to the exclusive NFT communities that are forming.
They are becoming both a new world of trading and a future of fine art collecting. In both cases, they are hospitable to the uber wealthy, and are the latest way to climb the social and financial ladder further into the heart of capitalism.
Take 18-year-old artist FEWOCiOUS, who has made millions auctioning off NFTs. The teen has jumped into the industry with full force, building a community through his sale of NFTs and placing himself at the centre of the intersection between craft and commerce. Yet the intersection is blurring the lines between money and art to the extreme.
NFTs are not just a new way of buying art. They’re becoming a currency in themselves. In New York, the auction platform Origin Protocol, which sold the viral video “Charlie bit my finger” as an NFT, is hosting events with entry requirements of NFT tokens via an online auction platform.
Grimes recently sold 10 pieces at auction, amassing a staggering $6 million. Her one-of-a-kind video, “Death of the Old” was sold at $389,000. Meanwhile, 700 copies of her pieces “Earth” and “Mars”, were sold at $7,500 each. Meanwhile, Balmain has launched its 3rd NFT project – trainers you can purchase that also give you access to exclusive VIP experiences. Gucci auctioned a video NFT at Christie’s in May for $20,000.
The roaring twenties are well under way. At the annual conference of NFT corporations in New York, crowds queued to get into Hammerstein Ballroom. The party was hosted by OpenSea, who facilitated over $10 billion in NFT trading volume in 2021 so far. Essentially, artists, buyers and dealers have found a way to immerse themselves even deeper into the exclusive world of investments and keep the good times rolling for those rich enough to partake.
Speaking this week to Freddie de Rougemont, Old Masters Specialist at Christie’s, a grimace at the mention of NFT’s said it all.
“It’s the same as the idea of online bidding at an auction,” he said ruefully. “It takes all the theatre out of it.”
I know what he means. There’s nothing quite like that wind-knocked-out-of-you feeling when you see a famous piece of art in real life for the first time. The goosebumps you feel when you begin to understand the meaning behind an artist’s entire life’s work are like no other. The hair-raising and invigorating moment when art creates beauty out of trauma, and you are moved by the genius produced from personal and historical pain.
Yet the art market has also always been dominated by a level of hype, a need to get the right people generating excitement about certain pieces, that often takes away from the art itself. I witnessed it in Christie’s, standing next to a dealer audibly excited by the beauty of an 18th century print. Less than a minute after he had moved away, a gentleman had rushed up to the print and taken a snap of its going price.
Working at Frieze Masters art fair this year was like this experience on crack. What was, I soon realised, the fashion week of art hosted in Regent’s Park, opened my eyes to the anxiety of the rich to bid on the most sought-after pieces. In their expensive tailored suits, fur hoods and bejewelled hands, jacked up on morning Marlboro’s and Vicodin, they work themselves into a frenzy over the Frieze catalogue, before rushing in to be schmoozed by gallery attendants.
Meanwhile, the lowly Frieze staff spend their lunch break fawning over the Basquiat that gleams from the centre of the room. I barely gave myself a moment to eat, so enraptured was I by my proximity to Auerbach, Freud and Moore. Yet I was also sucked into this slightly deranged bidding mentality. With only an hour to tour the fair, I found myself looking for the big names on the cards before I’d even bothered to look at the art next to it.
The world is too fast paced for money to be made from a slow and balanced approach to viewing art. Nowadays, bids for $1million + are made from the comfort of bed and bragging rights to virtual masterpieces can be bought at the click of a finger.
While it is a new form of people’s relationship with art, it stems from the age-old characteristic of the art world, that lingers in the hallways of Christie’s and spills out in bizarre escapades in Regent’s Park. It is the need to compete with others, to prove that one is better, and to show off one’s wealth, style and taste. It is the preoccupation of the wealthy and sucks the life out of the Auerbach that so captivated a 14-year-old me on a school trip to London.
When it comes to NFTs, the exclusive aspect to their business model is wholeheartedly denied by brands such as Balmain. Yet the current hype around NFTs promotes an access-only mentality to so many products, events and experiences that are unaffordable to most. According to investment banking firm Morgan Stanley, metaverse gaming and NFTs could constitute 10 per cent of the luxury goods market by 2030. Will this expand the world of NFTs to the rest of us, and will we want it? Only time will tell.
https://time.com/6115274/nft-conference-parties-culture/
https://news.artnet.com/art-world/hermitage-museum-auctioning-nfts-1992830
https://www.voguebusiness.com/fashion/exclusive-why-balmain-is-betting-big-on-nfts
https://www.theverge.com/2021/3/1/22308075/grimes-nft-6-million-sales-nifty-gateway-warnymph
