One of the best-known essays by the critic Walter Benjamin explored the transformation in the world of art caused by the ease of reproduction - an example of what we should now call Digital Disruption.
If the natural utilization of productive forces is impeded by the property system, the increase in technical devices, in speed, and in the sources of energy will press for an unnatural utilization.
Writing at a time when Fascism was on the rise, Benjamin thought this unnatural utilization would be found in war.
Technology has now come full circle, thanks to the Blockchain. Massive increases in the quantity and speed of technical devices, together with absurd levels of energy consumption, nowadays find their most unnatural utilization in Non-Fungible Tokens - works of art whose only purpose appears to be their non-reproducibility.
David Morris argues that
NFTs are valuable in themselves and represent a totally novel category because they give digital objects a claim on the sense of presence, history, and authenticity previously reserved for physical objects.
But Tom Whyman disagrees
But look closer, and one will see that this can’t possibly be what NFTs are doing at all. The tokens might be non-fungible: but the art (or similar) that any given NFT is associated with remains just as reproducible as it was before. ... When you own an NFT then, what you have purchased is not really a sports clip, or a piece of digital art , but simply a string of cryptographic information – information whose scarcity is guaranteed by the immense amount of real, planet-destroying energy that is required to produce it. As NFTs are becoming more widespread, then, the aura of art has if anything just been further profaned: on the blockchain, art is stripped of all its old value: all that was once sacred melted down into crypto.
Walter Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (1935)
David Z. Morris, Art in the Age of Digital Scarcity: Why NFTs Enchant Us (CoinDesk, 30 August 2021)
Tom Whyman, The Work of Art in the Age of the Non-Fungible Token
(Logically, 16 March 2021)
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: Walter Benjamin
Wikipedia: Non-Fungible Token, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction
Related post: Let the Coin take the Strain (October 2021)
No comments:
Post a Comment