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A motley crew of celebrities have tried selling digital art, including Snoop Dogg, Lindsay Lohan and John Cleese. Illustration: Illustration by Craig Robinson/Getty Images/The Guardian
Digital art is a billion-dollar business, with everyone from Paris Hilton to Damien Hirst trading in ‘non-fungible tokens’. But are NFTs just a get-rich-quick scheme masquerading as culture?
“It’s actually a lot simpler than you think.” It’s a Tuesday afternoon, and somewhat to my surprise, I’m on the phone to Paris Hilton, who is graciously explaining the world of NFTs.
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Hilton is many things – a reality star, an heiress, an unlikely lockdown fitness guru who uses designer handbags instead of weights. But until now, she has never been considered a significant player in the art world. When artists have acknowledged her, often they’ve done so to fetishise her image. In 2008, Damien Hirst bought a portrait of her by the artist Jonathan Yeo, in which her body is constructed from collaged images cut from porn magazines.
Yet in the past year she’s become a surreal figurehead in the NFT scene: a world flush with crypto dollars and high on a promise to transform the worlds of art and commerce. When we speak, Hilton has just returned from a bitcoin conference in Miami, where customers paid up to $25, 000 for VIP tables at the opening party to watch her DJ in a pair of diamanté-encrusted headphones. “NFT stands for non-fungible token, a digital token that is redeemable for a digital piece of art, ” she explains. “You can have it on your computer server or your phone. I have these screens in my house where I display them.”
Sure enough, at Hilton’s Beverly Hills mansion there are screens displaying NFTs she made in collaboration with the digital artist Blake Kathryn. These include a video of a chihuahua on top of a rotating ionic column (a tribute to her deceased pet Tinkerbell) and an animated self-portrait of Hilton as a sparkling CGI Barbie floating in the clouds, a piece she’s called Iconic Crypto Queen, and which she sold in April for more than $1m.
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Hilton first started investing in cryptocurrency in 2016. “I became friends with the founders of Ethereum, ” she says. (Ethereum produces ether, the currency in which the majority of NFTs are traded.) Since then she’s thrown herself into collecting crypto art, and owns more than 150 NFTs.
To advocates of the NFT, the technology offers a revolutionary new way of selling art, and of circumventing snooty cultural gatekeepers whose resistance to a crypto future seems as square as the 19th-century Parisian art world’s disdain for impressionism. In this context, the relevance of Hilton’s brand to the NFT movement makes sense. Pink, jewel-encrusted, and openly motivated by being as rich and famous as humanly possible, she’s a far cry from the type of person whose work is typically exhibited in blue-chip galleries or hung in booths at art fairs.
Yet Hilton’s endorsement may also be ammunition for those who view the NFT as just another depressing example of the speculative logic of finance monopolising taste. To detractors, from critic Waldemar Januszczak to artist David Hockney, the NFT marketplace is a home for morally bankrupt, environmentally vandalistic money-grabbers whose creations barely qualify as art.
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While most of us are still trying to remember what “fungible” means, a battle is under way to define how NFTs are understood. Are they a vital cultural product that tells us something profound about digital consumerism? Or are they just the latest cynical way to make absurd amounts of money?
A motley crew of celebrities have tried their hand at selling digital art, including Snoop Dogg, Lindsay Lohan and John Cleese. In July, it was estimated that sales of NFTs in the first half of 2021 rose by more than $2bn (£1.47bn) – a trend that prompted Christie’s and Sotheby’s to host their own NFT auctions and that is credited with driving contemporary art sales to an all-time high. But only a tiny proportion of the proceeds of art NFTs have ended up in the bank accounts of the galleries that have, in addition to auction houses, traditionally taken the lion’s share of art-market profits.
In March, the crypto firm Injective Protocol paid $95, 000 for Morons, a physical artwork by Banksy depicting an auctioneer selling a framed picture bearing the words: “I can’t believe you morons actually buy this shit.” They then burned the picture before selling a digital token of the work for $380, 000. The event was a marketing ploy, designed to stoke outrage, drum up publicity and turn a profit. Yet the symbolism was potent: digital art is here to replace its physical forebear, and its coming supremacy should be reflected by a higher price tag.
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In essence, an NFT is a digital certificate of ownership, almost always bought and sold using cryptocurrency, to which any digital file – a jpeg image file, a video, a song – can be attached. That Hilton is able to display Iconic Crypto Queen in her home, despite having sold it, is part of the NFT’s appeal – and the challenge it poses to the established business model for trading and accessing art. With a simple Google search, anybody can find and download the file associated with an NFT for nothing, and store it on their phone or computer, but only the owner has the right to sell it. Each NFT is unique, and all transactions are logged on the blockchain, a type of database invented in 2008 for the purpose of recording the movement of cryptocurrency.
Unlike the commercial gallery business model, NFTs are designed to cut out the need for art dealers, enabling artists to trade directly online, typically via specialist auction sites. Crucially, in contrast to the contemporary art world, there is no “vetting” of collectors – a practice intended to stop the most speculative buyers flipping artworks by quickly reselling them at a profit. Anybody can buy an NFT, and prices, so often a thing of mystery in high-end commercial galleries, are listed as a matter of public record. Every time an NFT is resold, its creator also makes a profit – an inbuilt royalty system missing from the physical art world, where artists often feel as if they have been shafted when their work is resold on the secondary market.
A model for trading and sharing art, built on the principles of financial transparency, royalties and easy access for all may sound egalitarian. The reality has been rather different. As soon as it became apparent that almost anything digital could be labelled as art and sold, the circus rolled into town.
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In March, Everydays: The First 5000 Days, a collage of previous artworks by a 40-year-old American named Mike Winkelmann, better known as Beeple, sold for $69.3m at Christie’s New York. After that, Kate Moss sold a gif of herself for more than $17, 000. Jack Dorsey, CEO of Twitter, sold an image of the first ever tweet for $2.9m. A Brooklyn film director managed to sell an audio file of his own farts for $85. Dominic Cummings even threatened to use the technology against Boris Johnson, by releasing what he said was evidence of government malpractice in the form of an NFT.
Along the way, the market became gratuitously inflated. Bidders at the top end included Vignesh Sundaresan, a blockchain entrepreneur who bought Beeple’s $69m NFT. A considerable number of small-time enthusiasts were also buying at the affordable end of the market, keen to celebrate the technology by investing in blockchain art. It didn’t take long before the bubble burst. By May, daily sales of NFTs had dropped by 60%. Crypto art’s reputation has also taken a knock because of its awful environmental track record. (The annual energy consumption of Ethereum is estimated to equal that of Iceland.)
Despite this, advocates still believe NFTs can mount a challenge to the monopoly on trading art held by commercial galleries, and even create a future where physical artworks are replaced by their digital counterparts. As Hilton puts it: “There are paintings out there that are $100m or more, but if you think about it, it’s really just canvas with paint.”
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I n the beginning, before the circus pitched up, there were nerds. Inevitably, because this is the internet, there were also cats. CryptoKitties, to be precise, is an online game launched in 2017, enabling players to trade and “breed” unique cartoon felines, sold as NFTs, using blockchain technology. Although the first NFT was created by a man named Kevin McCoy in 2014, CryptoKitties attracted attention and money, with some cats trading for hundreds of thousands of dollars. During 2020, as cryptocurrencies boomed and the pandemic accelerated our transformation into a species of screen-obsessed zombies, interest in NFTs rapidly picked up pace. As a consequence, the value of work by a relatively small number of artists already on the scene rocketed.
Among them was Trevor Jones, a 51-year-old painter who lives in Edinburgh. You’ve probably never heard of Jones, but he’s the most successful NFT artist working in the UK. He started making NFTs
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