Abstract
Web 3.0 economy and blockchain-based art
by Mariana Hartenthal (mhartenthal.near)
One of the main criticisms against NFTs is its supposedly gratuitous commercialism. Critics argue that blockchain-based art exists only for opportunists to make a buck out of disingenuous – or foolish – collectors expecting to make a profit from it in the secondary art market. Although we cannot deny that speculation and a sometimes-unfounded excitement is part of the nascent NFT ecosystem, this accusation misses one important aspect of the inner workings of the art world. Even the most traditional artforms are entangled with the market, at least in the Western world since at least the end of the Middle Ages. As art historian Michael Baxandall insisted in his influential study of 15th-century painting, “money is very important in the history of art” and thus market forces should not be dismissed as frivolous. Only those unfamiliar with history or with the current art world can pretend to believe that art exists in a pure context of innocent delight untouched by the evils of capital. Rather, artistic production, circulation, and consumption takes place within a network of people together with large and small organizations that need to make money, like the artists themselves. Until the advent of NFTs, the market for digital art faced a major obstacle: since content online flows so freely, there was no scarcity and therefore, it had little (financial) value. NFTs shift this paradigm as it enables online artworks to become verifiably scarce and unique. To those still bothered, it’s worth reminding that artificially imposed scarcity is nothing new. Photography went through a similar process of having to prove its value as “serious art” even though it was so easily created and distributed if compared to earlier artform (not considering prints). Nowadays, photography is a respected artform, collected, researched, and exhibited by major museums, and its validity would not be questioned by any self-respecting art enthusiast.
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