'The thousand-and-second tale of NFTs, as foretold by Edgar Allan Poe' by Johanna Gibson in (2021) 11(3) Queen Mary Journal of Intellectual Property 3249–269 comments
Everything went virtual in 2020, which may or may not have created the perfect storm for the apparent eruption of non-fungible tokens (NFTs) in the mainstream press. Of course, NFTs had been around for several years before this but, in March 2021, seemingly all of a sudden and everywhere at once, they were occupying almost the entire news cycle. Everything was NFTs, which is not bad for something that is nothing. The application of NFTs has continued with considerable momentum in recent months, with NFTs entering high-profile art markets in sales at the top auction houses, including: Christie’s, who sold Beeple, the first NFT based on an art work; Sotheby’s; and Phillips. But NFTs are now well beyond the elite world of contemporary art and moving into the mainstream consumer environments of fashion, film, music, food, publishing, and even architecture. I too am so under their spell, so to speak, that I have even minted my own NFTs into this article ... in a manner of speaking.
The current excitement has led to a proliferation of commentary and explication (of which this is merely the thousand-and-second), articles teeming with somewhat predictably obligatory references to Walter Benjamin and the age of mechanical reproduction, frenzied denunciations of any connection between NFTs and art, money, property, and everything in between, met with an almost revelational rhetoric of reverence in their defence. The tale of NFTs is indeed an absurdist one. But it is also a tale of detection. It boils down to cryptography ... and it’s a puzzle worth solving. An absurd cryptogram? We need a cryptographer for this strange tale. And who better to ask than Edgar Allan Poe? ...
So much of the noise around NFTs is preoccupied with their perceived nothingness, faddishness, and technomancy; the apparent inconsequence and untethered explanation for their value – afloat, adrift, and unbound. At the same time, so much of the suspicion and fear betrays a certain nostalgia for traditions of ownership, property, and objects, including the traditions of intellectual property and of money. NFTs and the surrounding technology have been described variously as alchemy, snake oil and spin, and even a hoax. And far from democratizing the market, the NFT marketplace has been criticized as nothing more than a secret world of nerds, fortune-hunting, and tricks. As well as confusion over what is being made, what is being sold, and what is being owned, cryptocurrency itself is notoriously volatile and described as a bubble or a fad, not a permanent development in representative currencies. That one of the newer cryptocurrencies is called Tether is all too fantastically connected. Balloons and inflations, indeed. Just another block in the chain.
But in the apparent emergence of NFTs from the elite world of art markets and into the mainstream, the tension between the original work of art and the mass production of consumer markets is persistent. What is the ‘original’ digital art to which the NFT relates, and what does owning that NFT mean? Is it originality in an idea? Is it ownership in an idea? Or is it all smoke and mirrors and nothing more than a date stamp? A contrivance of digital scarcity? Perhaps the joke is a twice-told tale, an originality in repetition, and this is where the real innovation, not only for art but also for ownership, might be found. Indeed, more than a digital provenance, or artificial scarcity, NFTs refer ownership not to the work, but to the encounter, the ritual, the communication itself. In this way, a multitude of NFTs might relate to one work, but what is repro- duced and yet produced anew each time is ownership in the original and unique encounter. In other words, the scarcity is not in the work but in each item of attention on the work. I would therefore disagree that the brand of digital scarcity created by NFTs is somehow at odds with the philosophy of the Internet. It is immaterial, quite literally, that Jack Dorsey’s tweet is still available, free as air even. NFTs place the value elsewhere, and bring res familiaris into play, a sociable property of affiliation and sympathy, as distinct from the rivalrous combat and traditional property lines of objects. As for the object, the NFT is a notice for taking; the objects proliferate because there is nothing for trade but preference. In other words, the competition is for attention – but not on the work or product amidst a sea of objects, as much as it is on the relationship between creator and buyer. Rather than scarcity, the value is generated through an abundance of encounters and an ownership of preferences: ‘This image is not an artwork, it is a description of an artwork. The artwork is how you feel when you read this’. No, an NFT is not art, at least not in the conventional, marketable sense. But the ritual may well be.
