Beeple (b.1981) "Every Day: 5,000 Days" NFT (jpg) February 16, 2021 Unique This is a giant collage that took more than 5,000 days to create
Beeple (b.1981) "Every Day: 5000 Days Ago" Partial ◎ Dong Huixian
Walter Benjamin said: "'Possession' is perhaps the deepest relationship we can have with things. ”
During the Winter Olympics, a social platform launched hundreds of digital snowflake prints created by different artists, and as long as some specific tasks were completed on the platform, they could get a limited edition digital snowflake and have the only number belonging to the work - an ordinary person, who really owned a work of art. Lo and behold, the unattainable paintings in the museum can be easily owned in digital form, downloaded to your mobile phone and computer, and decorated your desktop or circle of friends.
What is an NFT artwork
Fast forward a year ago, in March 2021, artist Mike Winkelman's work "Every Day: 5,000 Days" sold for $69.35 million (about 450 million yuan) at Christie's. The auction also made the artist famous, becoming the third-largest living contemporary artist after Jeff Koons and David Hockney.
Unlike the works of these two artistic predecessors, which are often exhibited in the museum, Winkelmann's work did not initially attract the attention of the industry. Rather, his work is more like an experiment: no elaborate frames, no surging brushstrokes, no solid materials laid on canvas, just thirteen years of work from 2007. He uploads a new digital illustration to his website every day, and according to an interview with The New York Times, his website is only accessed by his relatives and friends, and each of his works is named after a single memory-free point, "Every Day", and then he combines all of "Every Day" into the final work, "Every Day: 5,000 Days".
Compared with the sky-high turnover of this work, what makes the transaction more out of the circle is a new concept of art that follows: NFT, that is, non-homogeneous tokens, NFT art is also known as crypto art. Christie's auction test triggered a series of aftershocks: the major auction houses, galleries, and even art museums lurking in the primary and secondary markets all wanted to get ahead in this new wave of art. When a trend of obscure definitions sweeps over us, can we still maintain rational thinking to understand its underlying logic? What is crypto art? Will it be the next outlet for art? Or is this just a "new concept" game of capital for profit?
The history of art ownership is no longer a mystery
Successful auction houses and galleries often act as servants while also promoting new concepts to collectors and the public. For example, in this crypto art, Christie's Pat Line emphasized its three major characteristics when promoting the NFT concept, namely "rarity, authenticity and ownership history".
"Rare" is not equivalent to what we generally recognize in the context of crypto art. For example, Gu Kaizhi, the originator of calligraphy and painting, has none of his works circulated and his facsimiles have rarely survived, and only three of his painting theories have survived, which is the "rarity" in our general cognition. In the context of crypto art, the meaning of "rare" is actually "limited".
According to Christie's, artists and collectors can choose to generate limited reproductions of the same original work, like the number on many book tickets, which records the total number of works and the order of a certain work. Unlike the book stamp, every artwork generated and transaction record of crypto art is stored on the blockchain, that is, people have the right to view the number and ownership of a certain work to ensure the authenticity of the purchased work. Similarly, because the artwork is recorded on the blockchain, information about the artwork can be consulted, such as the work's metadata, ownership history, blockchain address, and so on. Every time a work of art changes hands, as well as the blockchain address of the wallet that once owned the work, it will be recorded, so the "ownership" of the artwork will also be fully recorded and cannot be tampered with. The reason why it cannot be tampered with is due to the decentralization of the blockchain, that is, there is no central server to save all the information, but instead each individual who participates in the blockchain records and passes on the overall information.
From a theoretical point of view, preserving the history of "ownership" does solve the pain points in the art market and art history. The history of art ownership comes from the French word "provenir", which is defined as a piece of history of the art transaction, including a large number of detailed information such as the object of the transaction, the time and the place of storage. To a certain extent, the richness of the information also affects the transaction price of art in the secondary market. These historical materials associated with works of art have stubbornly survived from the abyss of history, and their mission is not limited to the past of a work, in fact, they also carry history itself.
For example, when we want to review a print by the German expressionist artist Kollwitz, which was collected by Lu Xun, we can get a glimpse of how Lu Xun entrusted people to mail several of Kollwitz's prints back to China from Germany, or he entrusted the prints on hand to his friend Zheng Zhenduo to help print them into a book and become the reference material for woodcut prints at that time... Through these few pieces of information and only a few words, we can see the strong vitality and a turbulent history of a work of art. And that's just one piece of the history of one of the collectors.
In the long course of human history, the difficulty of preserving the context of a work of art is unimaginable to people in peacetime. Because of wars, turmoil, plunder, natural disasters and other reasons, the history of ownership of a work of art often appears in stages, or it is shaken and there is no news. When many institutions promote crypto art, a clear history of ownership has always been an amplified trait. In itself, we may have fallen into a paradox, on the one hand, we hope that the code, expecting technology to solve the problem of trust, so that all history can not be tampered with; on the other hand, we can not fully believe in technology, because behind technology, there are still human beings operating.
When "possession" is no longer "exclusive"
The emergence of a new concept of art is often based on the previously existing concept or rules of art, and at the same time further deformed in this old cognition, between constant temptation and repetition, or accepted by people, or forgotten by history. Therefore, when a new concept of art is invented, we need to deconstruct the inherent thinking and look at the new concept with a perspective that is both strange and based on existing cognition. Crypto art, to some extent, also overflows with people's experience between the sale and purchase of traditional art. In crypto art, the word "possessive" may be the clue that can best help us approach this fog, and when we understand "possessive", we may be able to explain this emerging artistic trend.
The philosopher and literary critic Benjamin was an avid collector in his life, writing fervently about his experience of collecting books from a foreign country, and he also painstakingly created a mysterious country (study) for his book collection. And his relationship with the book collection is also attributed to "possession"—an instinct-driven desire, as if he could possess not an object itself, but the culture, history, narrative, and even the vitality of the object behind it, which was given to the collector when he valued the object itself.
For many contemporary collectors, some people place their works at home and indulge in their aesthetic experience, fearing that this momentary intimate pleasure will be taken up; others have successively built private museums or lent their own collections to share their "possessions" with others. Crypto art is essentially similar to sharing your own collection with others. Therefore, when an NFT work is purchased, it does not indicate that the buyer has the exclusive copyright to the work. Conversely, these sold works are often found online with high-quality images.
Artist Winkelmann was asked a similar question in an interview: If everyone can appreciate my collection, then why should I spend money to buy it? Winkelmann replied: "When someone goes to the Louvre and shoots a picture of Leonardo da Vinci's Mona Lisa, no one thinks that the filmmaker owns the Mona Lisa." And when you buy an NFT work, everyone can know that you are the owner of the work. This witty statement seems to confirm the true value of crypto art and the cultural bonus that "possession" gives to buyers.
After the hot spots of art, or under the rendering of the media, or in the legends passed on by word of mouth, we are often prone to romanticize one hot event after another. The other side of the story is often overlooked consciously or unconsciously, after Winkelman's book Every Day: 5,000 Days, which broke the record, he received Ether, a virtual currency based on blockchain technology, and soon after, he quickly exchanged ether for dollars.
As a new artistic concept, NFTs cannot be conclusively concluded. Throughout the development of art history, many art concepts may be silent at the moment, but a hundred years later, they are still being studied and given a new concept of the times, and some art concepts, although popular, actually need more content to fill the poverty at the beginning of their establishment.
Photo courtesy of Christie's