NFTs
Token Supremacy Presents a Sensationalized Version of the NFT Boom
Art and finance have salacious appeal, as writers from Danielle Steele to Steve Martin have found, the latter stating tongue-in-cheek toward the end of his novel, An Object of Beauty: “Art was still art whether it was tied to money or not.” Yet Rembrandt died in penury, as New York Times reporter Zachary Small recounts in the introduction to Token Supremacy, their newly published book on the 2021 NFT market bubble and its aftermath. Small notes this while describing the infamous 17th-century Dutch tulipomania, an apt comparison to the NFT boom, and one that artist Anna Ridler, represented by Nagel Draxler, first made in her video series Mosaic Virus (2018 and 2019), though neither she nor her work are mentioned in Small’s book. Several artists making work about or with blockchain in the technology’s early years addressed its potential and the problems with its underlying financial model: Simon de la Rouviere, Simon Denny, Sarah Friend, Rhea Myers, Martin Nadal, César Andaluz, and Martin Lukas Ostachowski, to name a few. Small’s book recounts the two years of media-driven interest and inflation, but omits this backstory and wider scope, limiting readers’ understanding of what that moment was truly about, and thus, where it might be going.
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Across the book’s 12 chapters, Small guides readers through the roller coaster of NFT hype, and its associations with the boom-and-bust and regulatory concerns of cryptocurrencies. Tyler Hobbs, Mike Winkelmann (aka Beeple), Justin Aversano, and Erick Calderon, the founder of generative art platform Art Blocks, are Small’s protagonists of the 2021 boom, taking readers from Christie’s record-breaking auction of Beeple’s Everydays: The First 5,000 Days to the unexpected synchrony, a year and half later, between Art Blocks’ Open House in Marfa, Texas and Sam Bankman-Fried’s resignation from FTX, the now-bankrupt crypto exchange and hedge fund.
Small’s telling contains engaging anecdotes and the occasional digression to art historical antecedents—the evolution of photography and Donald Judd settling in Marfa—that provide obvious cultural references to anchor readers in this emergent technology. But for someone who participated in and was a close observer of the NFT boom, Token Supremacy seems mostly to reiterate popular magazine articles without providing significant new research or insights. This deficiency is underscored by Small’s goal, outlined in the introduction, to contribute to the history of cultural economics and the dynamics of speculation. There is much to say about the gnarly web that links artists, platforms, hedge funds, venture capitalism, regulation, and global finance, but it is not to be found in the four case studies and breezily recounted recent history that form this book. The shortfall between the book’s stated aims and its execution led me to wonder if Token Supremacy had not tried to fulfill the demands of two audiences: to present the art world’s particular usury in its dealings with crypto for those with some knowledge of both art and crypto and, at the same time, provide a Vanity Fair-esque retelling of NFTs that could credibly be a beach read.
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The demands of the latter lead Small to truncate important events, eliding their deeper complexities. For example, in the book’s first chapter, while Small recounts the desires of and the difficulties faced by the Christie’s employees driving the Beeple auction in March, they bypass telling how, several months earlier, Metapurse, the crypto-focused venture capital fund, sold fractionalized ownership stakes in 20 Beeple works as part of its B20 coin investment scheme. It isn’t mere trivia that Metapurse was then the buyer of Everydays for nearly $70 million, but material to why they had a vested interest in driving up Beeple’s prices. And while Everydays served as a kind of advertisement for B20, those works were not added to the coin investment scheme, as initially reported by Amy Castor. The B20 coin and Everydays would be an ideal case study in speculative tokenomics, and might have been used to explain how insider knowledge and “rug pulls” (where a group draws investors, only to abandon the project) operate within NFTs and crypto markets. Small, however, does not illuminate this connection or its implications.
Further, there is insufficient discussion of the dangers or negative impact that centralized marketplaces like MakersPlace or OpenSea had, nor the model they are based on: the decentralized platform Rare Pepe Wallet, established in 2017, which evolved from the Pepe the Frog, the cult internet meme that went from slacker icon to far right co-optation and, eventually, subsequent reclamation, partly via two Asian projects.
Another important financial feature deserving of greater analysis is resale royalties—Hobbs took in $9 million after an initial $400,000 sale at Bright Moments in 2021, as Small identifies—that were fought for by a group of artists led by Matt Kane in 2020. That recompense was lost during the spiraling of 2022 when marketplaces dubiously claimed they could not sustain it. Similarly, though Small mentions DAOs at regular intervals, unmentioned are the early experiments by artists (like Jonas Lund or Primavera de Filippi), the research initiative and insightful publication led by Furtherfield in London, the 2021 Wyoming legislation recognizing them as legal businesses, or the venture capital funding that was poured into incubators and accelerators. This might have provided insight into how hedge-fund money moved markets within the space, created packages or derivatives, including the possibility of shorting cryptocurrencies, which may have accelerated the crash while still producing a profit for a small percent of financiers. Such investigation would be worthy and meaningful not only to this NFT example but to understanding dangers in current market operations, especially for art’s increasing deployment as an investment vehicle. That would have required more than cocktail parties and dinners with “large burrata salads, wine, and mojitos” ending in “a taxicab headed back uptown” (as Small describes a moment returning from a Quantum Art dinner with artist Justin Aversano), which sounds more Sex and the City than To Catch and Kill.
Erick Calderon, Founder and CEO, Art Blocks.
FOX Image Collection via Getty Images
It is true that, say, Winkelmann and Calderon represent obvious figures within the boom market of that moment, though others like Dmitri Cherniak, Prince Jacon Osinachi Igwe, Sarah Meyohas, or the collective and creative platform DADA could have widened the lens on the impact of surging interest in NFTs and offered a more global perspective. For example, Cherniak is a leading artist who donated the revenue from Dead Ringers: Edition in February 2022 to the NYC Food Bank, providing 16 million meals (a value of approximately $3 million); Osinachi is a Nigerian artist whose work celebrates LGBTQ people in a nation with some of the harshest anti-gay laws and who launched an incubator to help onboard others into digital art; Meyohas produced Bitchcoin in 2015, before Ethereum, and garnered renewed interest in fractionalized work and her market; DADA was created by Judy Mam and Beatriz Ramos to connect participants through a shared digital drawing practice, which developed into an exercise in “the Invisible Economy” that seeks to distribute funds to the community as basic income.
Citations in Token Supremacy are sometimes peculiar and often unclear. Small never cites Zsofi Valyi-Nagy on Vera Molnar, though she is very likely the leading scholar on the artist, nor Amy Whitaker, a prominent author on the art market with research as early as 2019 exploring blockchain use cases for art. Though the book’s interviews are initially introduced with date and place, when interspersed with information and quotes from other articles, it becomes difficult to discern Small’s contributions from the established information. For example, in Chapter 3, they recount the heist of 309 CryptoVenetians from the Bright Moments DAO and gallery, but despite having spoken to participants, the tale seems largely cobbled together from Matthew Leising’s three-part series for Decential Media. In Chapter 2, Small tells the Berlin backstory of the dispute surrounding the first NFT and the McCoys’ Quantum, but this was explored in reporting during the court case. In addition, they write in this section that Sotheby’s head of digital art Michael Bouhanna’s “poor skills of observation and historical knowledge about digital art would push the NFT market towards destruction.” Whatever one may think of Bouhanna or the auction houses, that description seems like overreach.
Sometimes quotes from articles misrepresent the speaker and the article’s original context. At the height of the NFT boom in March 2022, critic Blake Gopnik wrote in the New York Times that Tina Rivers Ryan, then-curator of the Buffalo AKG Art Museum and now editor-in-chief of Artforum, suggested that “the new world of tokens may instead bring about ‘an impoverishment — and not just of digital art, but of art full stop, because it reduces art to being a frictionless commodity,’” with that quote within his text being hers. Small shifts Gopnik’s moderate sounding “may instead bring about” to a definitive and indicative present tense: “NFTs are “an impoverishment…”” This alters Ryan’s likely intent, given that she continues in Gopnik’s article to point out good examples of presenting NFT art. This is the kind of confusion that mitigates confidence in the book overall.
The lack of citations around certain claims becomes more problematic when alluding to major museums: “The investors who had spent lavishly during the bull market had drained their accounts, leading to embarrassing situations when these crypto ‘millionaires’ who pledged generous donations in exchange for seats on acquisition committees at museums like the Whitney and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art were booted after failing to pay their dues.” In answering questions about this, Angela Montefinise, the Whitney chief communications officer, explained in an email: “At the Whitney, acquisition committee members are invited based on their expertise. We have not had anyone removed from our acquisition committees for any reason, including failing to pay dues. This has not happened.” Similarly, Jessica Young, director of communications for LACMA wrote in an email, “This claim about the museum is absolutely not true and does not align with the standards of the acquisition committee and our institution.”
(Small, for their part, told ARTnews in an email, “That is contrary to what members of their own museum boards told me in the course of reporting this story.”)
Nevertheless, art and money, which are seemingly accessible to anyone, have this elusive quality that cultivates a kind of voyeurism; good narratives allow us behind the veil. Readers will find titillating moments. There are beautiful sentences in which meaning is not particularly important: “There in the digital filing cabinet is a sleepless delirium, an insomnia that turns the art-money into a parade of hallucinations that dance on the fence posts dividing perception and imagination.” Some art world readers will wonder why basics, like the Venice Biennale, are being explained, but may want greater detail on the regulatory blockades, given the ongoing discomfort with increased Know Your Customer and Anti-Money Laundering regulations overseas. Some general audiences may wonder why those museums that famously did collect NFTs during this period aren’t examined in greater depth.
But, as Small writes, “the best strategy for fooling wealthy people into buying art is to make them feel insecure before throwing economic data in their face.” There are a lot of facts and data thrown about in Token Supremacy but they don’t add up to much. For a moment in art deserving of such a cultural studies perspective, it is unfortunate for all the artists, galleries, museums, investors, critics, and audiences of the period that this book is a crash landing.
In the meantime, two other books have been released this year by participants in the current art economy: On NFTs (Taschen) offers an extensive eye-candy overview of many of the leading artists; and Right Click Save: The New Digital Art Community (Vetro) gathers important essays and interviews by scholars, curators, and pioneering and emerging artists about the global, fiscal, and cultural implications of NFTs. The cultural history, however, is yet to be told.
Editor’s Note, 6/13/2024: A previous version of this review incorrectly identified Small’s description of a dinner with “large burrata salads, wine, and mojitos” ending in “a taxicab headed back uptown” as taking place at an after-party for Erick Calderon’s opening at Venus Over Manhattan. It was actually for a Quantum Art dinner with artist Justin Aversano.